


a distant voice in the darkness

by coalitiongirl



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-08-03 01:57:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16316957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coalitiongirl/pseuds/coalitiongirl
Summary: Every night, Emma Swan– renowned knight and formidable ladies' woman– goes to the same tavern on the border to drink, flirt, and eavesdrop on the travelers passing through. Two kingdoms are at the brink of war, and she'll do anything to get away from the castle and its king and queen.And every night, a cloaked woman arrives to meet her, escaping a castle and king of her own. Slowly, Emma and "Reina" inch toward love, but something stands between them– a slew of terrible secrets, each more fatal than the next.The Evil Queen will still rise. Emma Swan has a war to fight against her. And there can be no happy endings until the truth comes out...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RedDove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedDove/gifts).
  * Inspired by ["And we meet at night, and we meet in secret..." [ Art ]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15812151) by [RedDove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedDove/pseuds/RedDove). 



> First, a huge thanks to the Supernova mods for putting together this whole event with such dedication and skill, no matter how many bumps along the road!! Y'all have me perpetually shook in the best of ways. <3
> 
> I did not at _all_ intend to write a second Supernova fic this year. I was super pressed for time and stressed about it, and I was relieved to be done. But when I heard that a fic had been disqualified from the event, I took a look at the attached art and was hella blown away by how beautiful it was. I _had_ to volunteer to pinch hit, and somehow this monster of a fic emerged from that inspiration. Thank you Pal for letting me play with your beautiful art!! I hope this fic does what you wanted it to!!
> 
> This fic takes place in an alternate kind of FTL. **Trigger warning** for an abusive and violent marriage– you won't see any actual scenes within it, but it will be referenced often from offscreen. Brief references near the beginning to miscarriage as well, and some mentions of parental abuse. There is also some non-graphic torture in Chapter 3 to look out for! This all makes this story sound so INTENSE but I promise it isn't!!
> 
> I hope you enjoy this fic!! I wanted to write something short and sweet. I failed at short, clearly, but hopefully not sweet!!

**_Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,_ **  
**_Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;_ **  
**_So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,_ **  
**_Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence._**

_–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn_

 

The tavern is at the outskirts of Leopold’s kingdom. It is far enough from the castle that it escapes notice from most, but attracts wayfaring travelers searching only for a place to spend the night. There are new visitors each night: some guards off on a military exercise, some simple wanderers searching for a new place to stay, and some– the ones Emma watches most– there only to slip under the radar.

 

There are always whispers, information passed from visitor to visitor, each bit of it another piece of a larger puzzle. Today, there is much chatter of Leopold’s queen, a quiet little thing whom Emma’s never met. _Another baby lost_ , they whisper. _Fragile womb. There will be no prince_. Leopold’s first queen had been sickly from the start, but this one is purportedly just a girl, healthy enough to bear his children and young enough that Emma’s nose wrinkles when she hears the whispers.

 

Still, every whisper is something to be catalogued. Emma listens closely, her eyes drifting across the tavern in search of visitors with less innocent motives. There’s a dangerous gleam in the eye of one man that catches her gaze. He sits with a few other men, his fingers absently stroking the side of a flagon of ale, and there is something hungry in his glare that has Emma wary, watching him as his gaze settles on a hooded figure across the tavern.

 

The figure is a woman, and Emma knows immediately why she’s drawn the attention of a dangerous man. She walks with hesitation, her cloak expensive and her steps small and trained, and the hand that pulls the cloak to her is smooth and unworked. She is alone, which is perhaps the most alarming part of all.

 

Men like the one with the flagon are predators, hunting for easy prey, and this woman shines like a beacon to them, inviting them forth to attack. She is careless and unpracticed in her movements, looks often over her shoulder and rarely at what awaits her in front of her, and she won’t make it more than a single drink here before she is accosted.

 

Emma shakes her head, slouching low in her seat, and then sighs and rises just as the man with the flagon does. He maneuvers through the crowd, his steps unsteady, and he bumps into the woman rather obviously. “My mistake,” he drawls, and twists to her side, his hand landing on the wall beside her to block her way.

 

She steps back, alarmed, and is flattened against the wall. The man leans in, his companions pressing forward behind them, and Emma sees the way that she flinches. Her face is still concealed below the hood, but her body language is taut and afraid, curled into herself as she speaks in a low voice to the man.

 

It only seems to anger him. “Do you think you’re better than us?” he demands, and Emma shifts to the side, steps through a raucous group of revellers and squeezes past the counter toward the wall by the door. “Do you think you can talk to me like that?” The _idiot_ woman must have said something cutting, because the other men laugh and the first man raises his hand and smacks it– hard– against the woman’s face. Her hooded head slams into the wall, and she doesn’t quite move after that. Emma’s jaw clenches.

 

“Answer me!” the man roars, and he pulls his hand back again, ready to swing it into the woman again. Emma reaches out and seizes his elbow before he can hurt the woman, twisting his arm and swinging him to throw him to the ground.

 

“I’ve had enough of you manhandling my lady,” she says calmly, her eyes flashing with the fury she can’t restrain. She slips an arm around the hooded figure’s waist, and the woman looks at her, eyes glinting beneath the hood. “Step back, or you might find yourself with my sword at your throat.”

 

She has a name here, and she has a barkeep with a soft spot for her who will step in if there is a need. She stands confidently, her free hand resting on her sword hilt, and the man stares up at her, outraged and ready to fight.

 

But there is something in her eyes that stays him, a danger of her own that is unyielding. The barkeep says mildly, “I would back down, if I were you,” and the man’s companions mumble and step away from her, thoroughly cowed.

 

Emma keeps her hand around the woman’s waist, tugging her close and giving the bar a trademark smirk. One of the regulars hoots. “Get her, Swan!” he says, leering, and the others laugh raucously. “Swan has a new lady!”

 

“What else is new?” another calls back.

 

She flirts shamelessly with all the bar wenches, with enough of the men as well that most assume that she’s here for entertainment instead of business. They take great delight in it, too, a woman they see as one of them, as crass and bold as the best of them. They trust her because of it, enjoy her presence even when she gives them little to go on, and she swaggers a little in place, playing a role with the woman still pressed to her.

 

The woman still hasn’t spoken, must be cowed to silence by the incident, and Emma throws a careless grin at the barkeep. “We’ll take my room,” she says, grinning, and she keeps her arm tight around the woman’s waist as the regulars cackle, sending her off with some very lewd suggestions about what she might do next.

 

Emma shoots them a roguish wink and catches the key that the barkeep tosses her, steering the woman she has pressed to her into the back of the tavern, where her room awaits. She keeps the woman at her arm, and she lowers her voice. “Just a little closer for appearances,” she murmurs, and the woman obliges, leaning in as Emma closes the door behind them.

 

The woman’s scent is of sandalwood and lemon, a wealthier perfume that Emma inhales before she says, “Okay, listen–” and the woman moves faster than Emma had thought her capable.

 

Her hand splays against Emma’s abdomen, and Emma flattens herself against the door, swallowing. “I–” she tries, and then the woman’s hand slides just a little lower–

 

–to her sword hilt–

 

–and she’s drawing Emma’s sword in a slow, clumsy move. Emma lets out a startled laugh, twisting the hilt from the woman and shoving her back from her. “Hey!” she says, a little outraged. “I saved your ass and this is how you repay me?”

 

The woman stumbles back, the hood falling from her head. And _oh_ , if she hadn’t worn that cloak, Emma is certain that she would have been accosted earlier. She’s beautiful, lightly olive skin almost glowing with a cleanliness rare in a tavern like this, and a face so perfectly comely but for the greening bruise on her cheek. But her eyes are what capture Emma’s attention best. They’re a dark brown, and they burn like hot coals, with a ferocity that Emma hadn’t expected from her meekness at the bar.

 

“Did you think I would repay you differently?” the woman demands, her voice throaty and cold and so terrified that Emma’s outrage fades. “Did you think I would do for you what he wanted from me?” She raises fists that have little muscle behind them, still shaking. “I will fight you until the end,” she grits out. “I will kick and scream and bite and claw at you until you regret ever touching me–”

 

Emma holds up a hand. “Okay, _stop_ . I didn’t grab you to…to do anything to you. I like my women willing,” she says, taking a step back. “I know who you are,” she says, and a flicker of fear passes across the woman’s face. “Another wealthy woman off for a joyride with the commoners.” She’s hardly a woman. She looks young, girlish enough to be Emma’s age, though her eyes hold years of weary pain within them. “Did you bring _anything_ to defend yourself?”

 

The woman scoffs, and Emma’s sharp eyes catch the way her eyes flick to the folds of her cloak for a moment. “A knife,” she guesses. “Did you seize it from your estate’s kitchens?” She knows she sounds mocking, and the woman glowers at her. Emma clears her throat. “You’d have gotten yourself killed– or _worse_ – like this,” she says.

 

“And you’re the safer option,” the woman guesses, her tone acerbic. “From that little display at the bar, I can imagine that you do this plenty. Is it a fun little game for you? Have your friends terrorize women and hope they’ll fall into your arms in gratitude?”

 

Emma can feel a flush rising to her cheeks. Not because the woman’s right, because she _isn’t_. But there’s something very appealing about the fire in her eyes, the way her face is darker when she’s angry, the bruise still an ugly green against her otherwise flawless skin. “No,” she says. “I helped you because I’m…well, I’m a knight,” she admits. “It’s kind of in the playbook.”

 

The woman laughs, which is frankly uncalled for. “No, you aren’t,” she says, dismissive.

 

“Yes, I am,” Emma says, offended. “How would you know? What, are you the captain of the guard?” The woman stops laughing, and Emma blinks. “ _Are_ you?” she says, suddenly glad that she hadn’t mentioned her second job description.

 

The woman scoffs. “You’re no knight. You’re too…scrawny,” she decides, waving at Emma, and Emma gasps in outrage.

 

“I am _not_! I can lift a grown man with these muscles! I have–” She lifts her tunic and vest, displaying her abdominal muscles. The woman stares, the lightest of flushes brown against her skin, and Emma swallows and puts her shirt down again, biting her lip. “I’m a knight,” she says again. “It seemed the chivalrous thing to do to help you. Now, can I clean that bruise on your face or will you stab me when I do?”

 

The woman freezes, touching her face in consternation. “I have a bruise?” she whispers, all laughter gone from her eyes. Emma can imagine an overprotective parent she must have slipped out on, what kind of reaction they might have to a sign that their daughter had gotten herself into danger.

 

“Sit,” she says, her voice gentling with the fear written across the woman’s face. “I have a salve that might help.” It’s washed with an enchanted potion, one Emma had gotten from the local fairies, and it is meant to heal wounds almost instantly.

 

The woman sits on the edge of the bed, gathering her cloak around her in wariness, and Emma says again, “I’m not going to _do_ anything to you.” The woman doesn’t respond, only watches Emma’s movements as Emma unties the pouch at her waist and finds the salve.

 

She pulls up a chair, squeezing a bit of salve out onto her fingers, and she leans forward, touching the woman’s soft skin with the tips of her fingers. Carefully, she massages the salve into the bruised skin, her eyes on the woman.

 

It’s unnerving how the woman doesn’t gasp in pain or even grimace at the pain she must be in when Emma touches the bruised area. She only sits very still, her lips pressed together and her eyes on Emma’s face. There is something very worrying about it– to Emma, who doesn’t know this woman enough to worry– about a woman who has learned already not to show when she’s in pain.

 

Emma rubs in the first coating of the salve, and then pours some water into her palm, rinsing off the affected area. The woman watches her silently, eyes trained on her and leaving Emma a off-balance. “It should take an hour or so before it’s gone,” she says, her voice shaky. “I’ll– I can go get you some food while you wait.”

 

The woman doesn’t respond, only watches her, Emma’s fingers still stroking the fading bruise. Emma holds out her flask of water, thrusts it at the woman. “Drink,” she says. “It’ll help.”

 

The woman takes the flask, her fingers brushing Emma’s, and Emma shivers and stands, swallowing as she watches her again. There is something striking about her beauty, more than in any of the usuals who haunt the tavern. It isn’t just the wealth of her clothing and appearance. There’s a delicacy to her but a strength beneath it, the fire that makes it clear that she has fight running deep within her.

 

“I’ll be right back,” Emma promises, and she ducks out of the room with reluctance, a part of her crying out in protest at the idea of leaving this woman behind for even a moment.

 

But she looks thin– too thin, as though she’s eaten far too little for far too long– and Emma heads down the hallway, slapping hands absently and smirking so no one questions what’s been going on in her room. She purchases a meal fit for a king, sets it upon a tray, and returns to her room.

 

The room is empty, the cloak gathered up and Emma’s salve gone with the woman. Emma shakes her head and leans against the wall, unsurprised.

 

She’d expected the woman to run, of course. Still, she’s a little disappointed.

 

* * *

 

The woman doesn’t return the next night, or the third, and by then, it’s time for Emma to return to her king and queen over the border. The reports are brief, unremarkable and with nothing new to report. Leopold’s queen’s continued infertility is the only bit of news that piques the queen’s interest.

 

“Poor little thing,” the queen says, sighing. “She was so terrified at her wedding, too. I remember how she shook. Her mother reprimanded her right in front of all the royals with some nonsense about how a queen comports herself.”

 

The king grimaces. “That woman terrified her more than Leopold. The girl was fine after that.”

 

“The people haven’t taken to her,” Emma reports. “They think she’s a pale imitation of Queen Eva. She has some commoner blood and some foreign blood, and both aren’t enough for the snobs in the main villages. And Leopold himself shows little interest in her, so they follow suit.” She feels a little flash of pity for a girl she’s never met, a child bride who has no one at her palace at all.

 

The mother is gone, at least, or so say the rumors. There are whispers of witchcraft involved, of a woman who’d been ejected from the palace on the night after the wedding. The people blame their new queen, but it could have just as easily been Leopold himself. Emma’s never liked him, not for the way he sneers at some of the lady knights in her kingdom or for the coarse way that he speaks to their young prince. She imagines he would take steps to remove a formidable witch from his kingdom.

 

But she doesn’t report that, not without corroboration, and she instead is dismissed from the throne room and goes off to find the prince. He is waving an enormous sword in the courtyard, too tiny to wield the weapon. Emma leans back against the wall of the courtyard, watching as Lancelot helps him adjust it again.

 

“I’m meant to be an archer,” the prince says, pouting. “Graham says I’m one of his best students.”

 

“You’re the prince,” Emma says dryly. “Get better. Don’t listen to your fawning subjects.”

 

The prince scowls at her. “And shall I tell my parents that you think I _suck_?” The king and queen are famously overprotective of their prince, their golden boy. But still, they are reasonable.

 

“Only if you think I’m wrong,” Emma says, her voice challenging.

 

The prince swings around, away from Lancelot, and charges toward her. She fights him off easily, drawing her sword and sparring with him, and he raises his arms and brings the sword crashing down onto Emma’s. She swings, letting his weight fall on her and then twisting, deflecting his weight and sending him crashing to the ground.

 

He glares up at her, and she smirks at him and then pulls him to his feet and into an embrace. “Keep it up, kid, and you’ll be able to knock me onto my ass someday,” she says, rumpling his hair until he whines in protest. He is six and very determined already to seem like an adult. She adores him despite herself, and she adores haranguing him even more.

 

He makes a face and then leans back against her, his arm sliding easily around hers. “Are you staying?” He’s the only one happy to see her here, and reluctant to see her go.

 

“I don’t think so,” she says, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. “Too much to do on the border. Go practice your sword, okay? Show me you’re better than I think you are.” She winks and wanders off, back to the stables where she’s left her horse, her thoughts straying to the woman from the tavern as she rides away.

 

* * *

 

However carefully constructed her image might be, the people are right about one thing: she _is_ a shameless flirt who delivers on it. There isn’t a barmaid in that tavern whom she hasn’t taken back to her room, easy one-night stands after which they strut around the tavern as though they’ve joined the ranks of something special. Emma finds a sort of comfort in oblivion, in casual intimacy that means nothing at all.

 

She doesn’t think that last night had been about oblivion, though she avoids thinking too deeply about it. She hadn’t planned on sleeping with the woman, or even on seducing her. There had been a vulnerability to the woman from the start, a timidity behind her ferocity that had made Emma sure that seducing her might break her.

 

And yet, Emma’s still thinking about her, this mystery woman from the night before. She forces her mind on the present, on the barmaid who is currently perched on her lap, leaning against her so her lips can brush Emma’s neck. “I think we’ve already had our fun,” she reminds the maid, but she doesn’t push her away.

 

“We could have it again,” the barmaid breathes, licking the shell of her ear. The men around the table guffaw, ale making their laughs more unguarded, more careless. They are messengers from Leopold, on their way to the Northern Kingdom to send a bevy of threats to him. Leopold doesn’t expect to make good on those threats, because his ministers are certain that the Northern Kingdom will fold. Emma knows this because the messengers had mentioned it when she’d engaged them in conversation, a barmaid on her lap and a second massaging her shoulders.

 

Appearances are _everything_ , and Emma curls a hand around the first maid’s waist, squeezing her thigh. The barmaid lets out a little breathy moan, and Emma says, “Sounds like you’re all wasting your time,” to the messengers. “Might as well spend a night here and say you were locked in the dungeons.” She wiggles her eyebrows and throws back her head to laugh with the men, the barmaid taking advantage of her change in position to kiss the underside of her jaw, then nip at her neck. Emma groans. This barmaid has been particularly aggressive in showing her affections, as though Emma might fold eventually.

 

She doesn’t sleep with anyone here twice, is too aware of what kind of attachments might come with that. Emma avoids attachments, avoids any liaisons that don’t have a purpose. She doesn’t do this for pleasure– though it’s a nice bonus– but for–

 

 _Wait_. Abruptly, she becomes aware of another figure standing opposite her table, a gaze beneath a cloak fixed on Emma in what she imagines is disgust. “Sorry,” she says, lifting the barmaid into her arms and then setting her down on the chair. “Gotta go.”

 

The barmaid lets out a whine. Emma weaves around the table, taking the cloaked woman’s arm and guiding her from the room to the door to outside. “You disappeared last night,” she accuses her.

 

The woman pulls back her hood to glare at Emma, eyebrows arched. “You seem to have found some comfort in my absence,” she shoots back. “That little display was _obscene_. And you want me to believe you’re a knight?”

 

“I _am_ a knight,” Emma protests. “I’m just…popular. And she started it.” Emma had just…not pushed the barmaid away, which isn’t a _crime_ , no matter how the woman is glaring at her. “Look, if you want to be the one on my lap, I’d be happy to–”

 

The woman thrusts a vial at Emma, her cheeks darkening. “I came to return this. I didn’t realize I’d taken it until I was gone,” she says.

 

It’s a lie, and Emma knows it as soon as she holds the vial of her salve. It’s half gone when it had been full before, and Emma’s brow furrows. “You only need a drop to heal any wound,” she says slowly, and her eyes turn to the woman, who looks stubbornly defiant in the face of Emma’s realization.

 

The woman had found use for all of that salve, and thoughts of _why_ turns Emma’s stomach. “Someone is hurting you,” Emma says, and she can feel a slow rage building within her at the thought of it, of this beautiful woman who seems so delicate brought to her knees by… “Your father,” she guesses.

 

The woman’s eyes flash. “No,” she says, but she doesn’t deny that she is being hurt, that she has reason to use Emma’s salve. “He is a good man. Kind.”

 

“It can’t be a husband,” Emma says, her eyes flickering over the woman. There is a scar she hasn’t removed, slashing across her upper lip, and a tongue swipes out over it nervously. “Your hands are unworked, your cloak is made of fine material– all of which points to you coming from a wealthy family. No wealthy family would need to sell away a daughter so young into marriage.” The woman meets her eyes, her face expressionless. “So if not your father, an uncle?”

 

“My mother gave me this scar,” the woman says, and she stares into the night, away from Emma. “The others are more recent. None of this is your concern.” She scoffs, the sound meant to be haughty but miserable instead. “Go back to your barmaids.”

 

Emma won’t be dissuaded so easily. “They’re a distraction,” she says dismissively, reaching for the woman’s arm. “Anyone who has injured you enough that you needed half my salve for it isn’t _family_. I know that, and I don’t even have a family. You can’t go back there.”

 

The woman looks amused at that. “Maybe you _are_ a knight. You do have that insufferably stark view of the world.” She pulls away from Emma’s grasp, gathering her cloak back around her. “If I could ride off into the dusk, I’m sure I would. But you wouldn’t understand the reasons why I will never have those choices.”

 

She turns to go, and Emma blurts out after her, seized by a desperate desire for this woman to stay, “Do you like to ride?” There had been a wistfulness in the _if I could ride off into the dusk_ , a surprise from a woman who is certainly wealthy enough to travel only by carriage.

 

The woman blinks at her and says dryly, “Not as much as you seem to.”

 

Emma winces as she recovers. “You know what I mean.” The woman watches her, amusement glittering in her eyes. Emma clears her throat. “Come back tomorrow, okay? I’ll have a surprise for you.”

 

The woman doesn’t respond, only turns away, and Emma calls after her again, “What’s your name?”

 

The woman turns back, eyebrows raised. “Do you really need that to try to lure me into your bed?”

 

“That’s not–” Emma shuts her eyes, then opens them. “That’s not what I’m _doing_ ,” she says frustratedly, though her baser instincts seem to demand it. She _is_ beautiful, with a sharp wit and enough mystery around her that Emma has thought of her a dozen times in the past day. But still, Emma has been a perfect knight in her presence, has given her no reason to believe that she might have ulterior motives, because she _doesn’t_. “If I wanted to lure you into my bed, you’d be in there,” she says with confidence.

 

The woman is less skittish now, her eyes widening in outrage. “How dare you,” she says, and Emma takes it as a challenge.

 

She moves forward, prowls like a cat on the move, and the woman freezes as Emma reaches out to stroke her cheek. Her fingers brush over the spot where the bruise had been, her eyes dark and lidded, and the woman curls her fingers into Emma’s arm in response, as though to pull her away. But her nails dig into Emma’s sleeve instead, and Emma shifts closer still, her thumb brushing the woman’s lip. The woman exhales, the challenge gone from her eyes, and she only looks sad and lost now.

 

Emma’s hand falls from her face. The woman turns her head, staring out into the distance instead of catching Emma’s eyes again. “Reina,” she says. “My name is Reina.”

 

“They call me Swan here,” Emma offers. Reina is lying about her name, but Emma doesn’t give out her name easily, either, and she quashes her disappointment and watches as Reina exhales, the moment where she’d only seemed trapped by Emma gone.

 

Reina offers her the ghost of a smile. “Until next time, Sir Swan,” she says, the tiniest hint of sly mockery in the _Sir Swan_ , and she departs toward the front of the tavern without looking back.

 

Emma follows her, quiet and as subtle as she can manage it. Reina is looking back furtively, searching for visitors who might see her go, and Emma ducks behind the wall of the tavern stables and waits.

 

After a few minutes, Reina is appeased, and she takes a glass trinket from the folds of her cloak and holds it up. It shimmers with magic, and Emma stares, watches as the shimmer seems to ripple out until Reina is glowing, too, with that same magic.

 

Another moment, and Reina and the shimmer around her are gone.

 

* * *

 

So Reina has access to magic, but not enough to heal herself. Emma ponders it once Reina is gone, no longer interested in going into the tavern to chat up anyone new. She’s gotten what she needs, anyway, and there is nothing more to do but think about this mysterious woman.

 

She’d needed a trinket to teleport away, so perhaps it had been gifted to her. Potions aren’t impossible for the non-magical, though few have the patience and resources to mix them. More likely, Reina had obtained the trinket via a fairy godmother or a kindly family sorcerer who’d taken pity on this girl with a mother who hurts her. Reina uses it to escape her lot in life, but she can’t be gone long, for some undisclosed reason, or she might have run entirely.

 

Or perhaps not. She had scoffed at the idea when Emma had brought it up, and Emma is unsurprised but disappointed when Reina doesn’t return the next day or the one after that. Emma had pushed too far, had been too intrusive, and Reina is keeping her distance now.

 

She pushes aside thoughts of Reina with little success, makes eyes at a few giggling girls from across the tavern and chats them up for the night that they’re in town. They’re daughters of wealthy nobles, returning from a weekend excursion in the Northern Kingdom. The border knights had refused to let them in at first, wary of the hostility between the Northern Kingdom and Leopold’s, but with enough gold lining their pockets, they’d allowed the girls entry.

 

“Shameful,” Emma pronounces with great flair, winking at them. “And who was this noble knight who might give me passage as well?”

 

The girl closest to her, who has heard enough of her reputation from other tavern-goers to have wound her arm through Emma’s and leaned in close, says, “I don’t know his name, but he has a little red feather coming from his helmet. _Handsome_ , too.” She sighs wistfully. “Though I suppose we have some equally handsome individuals in our kingdom as well,” she says, looking up through her eyelashes at Emma. She has the same dark eyes as Reina, a pert little crinkle to her nose that reminds Emma of her.

 

A few minutes later, they’re stumbling through the back hall of the tavern toward Emma’s room, the girl’s legs around Emma’s waist and her lips fused to Emma’s. Emma fumbles with the key, unlocks the door and staggers into the room.

 

A startled voice says, “Oh.”

 

Emma freezes, setting the girl down carefully as she turns around. “Something’s come up,” she says to the girl, her eyes on the bed. “I do apologize.”

 

The girl pouts at her, but Emma isn’t looking at her, and she lets out an irritable sound and stalks from the room, slamming the door behind her. Emma doesn’t look back, her eyes fixed on the bed, where Reina is perched at the end of it, fiddling with the folds of her cloak. “I didn’t think you were coming back,” Emma says, swallowing.

 

Reina shrugs, shoulders barely rising beneath her cloak. “I was otherwise occupied,” she says delicately, and if not for the haunted look on her face, Emma might have been affronted.

 

Instead, she is alarmed, and she bites it back and grins at Reina instead. “Well, I do still have that surprise for you,” she says. “Come with me.”

 

She holds out her hand and Reina takes it, following Emma down the hall and to the stables. Emma’s horse is stabled there, a second, majestic horse beside it. She’d picked him out from the royal stables, a good-natured, beautiful horse whom she’d thought would suit Reina. “You wanted to ride into the dusk,” she reminds Reina, who is staring up at the horse with undisguised longing on her face.

 

There is something different about her today, something pained and careful in how she moves. Emma watches her, fearing the worst, and she says, “We don’t have to– if you aren’t up for riding–”

 

Reina can’t possibly have a husband. But Reina walks as though she’s been hurt in the most sensitive of places, as though it is a struggle to move, let alone ride. Reina stares up at the horse and looks as though she might weep. “I don’t think I am,” she murmurs.

 

“Next time, then,” Emma says, shrugging as though it doesn’t matter at all. Within her, something burns hot and furious for this woman she hardly knows. Emma is no stranger to the vile things that can happen to vulnerable women, but she has been fortunate to spend most of her life protected from them. She yearns to protect those who haven’t been, who suffer from a fate they can’t escape–

 

“There’s a lake nearby,” she says, and her hand moves to Reina’s back almost instinctively. “No riding necessary. We can sit for a bit.” Reina nods jerkily, and Emma walks with her, guiding her to the spot where the moon– high in the sky– seems to light up the lake in silver.

 

They sit in silence for a few minutes, Emma restraining herself from saying what she wants to and frightening Reina off again, and Reina says suddenly, “I won’t apologize for interrupting your fun with that girl. She was a _child_.”

 

“She was older than you, I’d wager,” Emma says, narrowing her eyes at Reina. “Older than me, too. Just a lot more…energetic.” She drawls out the word, and Reina laughs silently, screwing her face up in disgust. “She could have kept me busy for hours.”

 

“Doubtful,” Reina shoots back. “Too restless. She would be bored of you in minutes.”  

 

Emma raises her eyebrows, a smirk spreading across her face. “No one is bored of me in minutes.”

 

Reina flushes. “You aren’t very convincing as a knight,” she says reprovingly.

 

“What do you know about knights?” Emma says challengingly. “I’ll have you know that I’m the best the kingdom has–”

 

Reina snorts, a hint of playfulness in her eyes. “And yet, you’re spending all your time out in some tavern on the border, drinking and womanizing. Seems likely.”

 

“Well, the king and queen don’t like me very much,” Emma admits grudgingly. “Which says _nothing_ of my skill.”

 

Reina is silent for a moment, the playfulness gone. “I didn’t know that the queen had any sway over the knights,” she says.

 

The tavern is always alive with gossip about the queen, who remains a pale shadow, a forgotten royal who rarely emerges into the public eye. Emma shrugs, nudging Reina. “I didn’t say I was a knight of _this_ kingdom,” she says. “The knights here are all ignorant boors.”

 

Reina quirks an eyebrow. “And you’re the picture of grace.”

 

“In fact, I am,” Emma says, offended at Reina’s doubt. “I went to _finishing school_.” Reina blinks at her. Emma amends, “I was summarily ejected from finishing school. Probably because there was nothing left to finish about me,” she says haughtily. “Certainly not because I broke into the kitchens and accidentally set them on fire–”

 

Reina is laughing, her eyes sparkling, and she leans back against a fallen log and watches Emma. “How tragic,” she says. “I never attended finishing school. Mother always said that it was for those beyond hope of propriety.”

 

“Sounds about right,” Emma says, flippant, if only to get another laugh from Reina. “I suppose you were a perfect lady. Look at that _posture_ ,” she says, gesturing at Reina as she leans against the log. “Legs bent below your knees just so, elbows concealed, body bent in a curve, alluring without being inviting–” She’s reciting old, absurd rules from finishing school, and Reina laughs helplessly, watching as Emma gesticulates dramatically. “Truly, any knight would sweep you away in an instant to be their wife.”

 

The laughter stops abruptly, and Emma feels the weight of the flippant comment between them. Reina looks out at the lake, avoiding Emma’s eyes, and Emma doesn’t know what it is that had set Reina distant from her again.

 

She changes the topic, talks instead about a man at the tavern today who had been distinctly unknightly and had insisted that he was a close friend of the queen. “The queen doesn’t have close friends,” Reina says, her lip curling. “The queen doesn’t have any friends.”

 

“So my fellow drinkers say,” Emma says. She rolls her eyes. “As far as they’re concerned, the queen is the devil herself. She’s just a girl. And Leopold is no angel.”

 

“Leopold is a good and kind king,” Reina recites as though from memory, and Emma can imagine her as a girl, sitting with a tutor who tells her all the right things that she must believe. “The Northern Kingdom and their warmongering have bankrupted the kingdom, not King Leopold. He has done everything in his power to protect us from their incursions on the border.”

 

Emma eyes Reina dubiously. “And you believe that?”

 

Reina shakes her head. “We’re meant to. Which kingdom are you from?” she asks, her eyes sharp on Emma.

 

Emma should never have told her that she isn’t from this kingdom. She’d been so desperate for Reina’s eyes on her that she’d been too bold, too careless, and now Reina watches her as though she might suspect the truth. “Around,” Emma says, shrugging, and she changes the topic. “I don’t mean to brag, but I’m pretty close with the queen’s best friend. Maybe she’ll help me get settled in this kingdom.”

 

Reina laughs, though it sounds weaker than before. “Will you win her over as you do all the ladies?”

 

“With great pleasure.” Emma pretends to preen. “I have heard she is a great beauty, though quite standoffish.” Reina tilts her head. Emma grins at her. “I can handle a challenge. I’m _very_ charming.”

 

“That you are,” Reina concedes, and Emma’s stomach flips as it hasn’t in a long time, overwhelmed at the sight of Reina’s smile emerging again.

 

* * *

 

Reina is back again the next night, then the next, at which point she deems herself ready to ride a horse again. They race across the plains that stretch along the border of the Northern Kingdom, Reina keeping pace and then speeding past Emma until Emma is struggling to keep up. Emma is an endurance rider, but Reina is flashy and swift, one with her horse and so fast that she leaves Emma far behind and then canters back to wait smugly for her.

 

She is beautiful in her sorrow, in the tragedy that hangs over her as much as her cloak on some days. But she is stunning in her exhilaration, in the moments when her cloak billows behind her and her hair falls back in the wind as she rides. Emma is alternatively speechless with wonder and babbling with renewed idiocy, struggling to capture the energy of her delight again.

 

On the days when she arrives, Emma detaches herself from conversation at the tavern and hurries to her, urging her from the bar where she won’t ever remove her cloak’s hood. Reina will wait otherwise, lip curled with disdain as Emma struggles to remove herself from interested men and women. “People _like_ me,” Emma says in feeble excuse, and Reina mutters something like _can’t imagine why_ as she leads her out of the tavern.

 

The regulars find it hilarious that Emma has been so tamed by a woman whom she hasn’t even slept with. Emma’s favorite barmaids are pouty and dismissive. “I bet she drops the hooded lady as soon as she beds her,” one of them says one night as they clean out bedsheets in the back of the tavern. Reina, who is sitting with Emma out of sight against the wall, flushes dark brown at that and pulls her cloak closer. “She’s drunk on the chase. She’ll be back to her old self in no time.”

 

It is getting harder and harder to find her _old self_ , as necessary as it is at times. Even when Reina isn’t there, there is a guilt to every flirtation, an impropriety Emma’s never felt before. Reina is captivating, is enough that Emma forgets at times why she’s at the tavern in the first place, and Emma cares little for the opinions of jealous ex-lovers.

 

She goes home to her king and queen and reports what she hears, and endures their disapproving looks before she heads out to find the prince. He is practicing with his sword again, and he launches himself at her with a battle cry.

 

Emma fights him off easily, sending him to the ground and then letting him ride around on her shoulders for the duration of her visit. “I’ll be leaving at nightfall,” she warns him, and she holds him tightly, lies with him under the sun and listens to him prattle on about everything she’s missed since she’d left.

 

At nightfall, she saddles her horse when she’s stopped by the queen. “Leopold is sending a delegation early tomorrow,” she says, and she frowns at Emma. “We need you here.”

 

“I’m much better used at–” Emma begins, but she deflates at the unyielding expression on the queen’s face. “Fine. I’ll cause another diplomatic crisis,” she huffs, and the queen only sighs and walks away.

 

Emma finds a vacant room in the castle, long abandoned, and stretches out there for the night. The prince finds her there an hour later, creeps in beside her in his pajamas and says sulkily, “What’s so great about that tavern, anyway?”

 

Emma laughs. “Nothing, except for the people who talk. You know I can’t spend too long here with your parents or someone is going to lose their mind.” There’s a pang at that statement, a quiet grief that she can’t name, and the prince huddles in closer to her. “Do you remember the last time you saw King Leopold?” she asks, wrapping an arm around his waist.

 

The prince nods. “You weren’t there. We had negotiations last year, too. Just after he wed Queen Regina.” He smiles at the memory. “No one else paid any attention to me, but she played hide-and-seek with me while King Leopold and Father were yelling at each other. She was the only good thing about that visit.” He frowns. “She was really pretty. And really sad. I hope she comes with this delegation, too. Maybe she’s happier now.”

 

“Probably not,” Emma says, feeling another flash of compassion for a woman she’s never met. “Being royalty sucks, especially when you have to be married to _Leopold_.”

 

The prince makes a face. “She was way too nice to be his wife,” he decides, and Emma squeezes his arm, quiet regret in the motion. She hadn’t gone to the wedding, had boycotted it on principle mostly to piss off the king and queen, but she wishes she had, that she could have met Leopold’s wife before the hostilities had intensified.

 

Maybe she just wants to make the prince happy.

 

She sighs, her thoughts drifting off to another woman, and the prince nudges her arm. “Who are you thinking about?”

 

“Who says I’m thinking about a person?” Emma counters, and the prince laughs.

 

“You _are_. You have a dopey smile.” He pokes at it, and she snaps her jaw threateningly, the prince pulling his finger away just in time. “Who is she?”

 

Emma sighs. “Just a friend. I think she’ll be expecting me tonight,” she says, and she doesn’t like the idea of Reina wandering the tavern alone, searching for Emma amongst a throng of jealous barmaids and lecherous visitors. “I’m sure I’ll see her tomorrow night,” she says wistfully.

 

* * *

 

But the next day, too, demands her presence at the castle. She lurks in the background of unsuccessful negotiations, glowering at the delegation from the other side until they complain of intimidation and she is ejected from the room. “I _told_ you I’d cause a diplomatic incident,” she complains to the queen.

 

The queen sighs heavily. “You can go back to the border early tomorrow,” she says in defeat. “I don’t want them to see you leaving.”

 

So Emma returns to the tavern after two nights spent away, crawls into her bed there and sleeps all day until the sun is beginning to set and she is fully refreshed. She steals out into the tavern, greeting other regulars and listening to the conversation with half an ear.

 

It’s all about the delegation sent to the north, of course. Many think it’ll fail, and some insist that it’s only a diversion while the north chips away at the land that Leopold had won from them. “They’re taking it back, piece by piece and no one has the balls to stop them,” one traveler declares.

 

“It was theirs to begin with,” points out another. “The people on that land never wanted to be Leopold’s to begin with.”

 

The first traveler scoffs. “Why wouldn’t they? Give up the wealth of our kingdom for the cold of the Northern Kingdom? I don’t think so.” He leans back. “If I lived on the border, I’d stop resisting Leopold and take up arms against the Northerners. Ingrates, all of them.”

 

Emma tunes them out as the debate becomes a full-blown argument, her eyes scanning the area near the entrance of the tavern. There are no women hidden in the shadows, no visitors casting an eye on her from afar. Emma sighs and drinks from her tumbler, her gaze still fixed on the door.

 

And then, finally, the door opens and a cloaked figure steps inside. Emma can’t see her eyes, but she knows the moment that the woman catches her gaze, the moment when she must see her, because Reina marches up to her in a flash of righteous fury. “Where the hell have you _been_?” she demands from beneath her hood, not bothering even to be subtle today.

 

One of the men whistles. “Swan’s in trouble with the missus,” he snickers.

 

Emma swallows her drink and sets it down. “I wasn’t able to get away–”

 

“You should have _told_ me!” Reina says furiously. “I was in this tavern with these– these disgusting _animals_ –” She gestures rather dramatically at the man who’d whistles, who squints at her as though he isn’t quite sure if he’s been insulted. “Waiting for nights! I thought you might be _dead_! You’d better hope you were dead!”

 

“I’m sorry,” Emma says, a little bemused. She’d prepared herself for Reina to be afraid or annoyed that she’d been gone. She hadn’t expected her to be so angry. “I didn’t know I had to inform you of everything I do. You don’t–”

 

“You– you– _augh_!” Reina spits out finally, and she turns on her heel and storms from the tavern.

 

Emma groans and bangs her head against the table. “She’s a firecracker,” one of the regulars comments. “I see what you see in her.”

 

A barmaid says scornfully, “She’s a waste of space. How dare she speak to you like that– I would _never_ –” She strokes Emma’s arm. “She isn’t worthy of a lady lover like you.”

 

“She isn’t my lady lover. She’s…she’s a friend,” Emma says finally. She has had dozens of lovers here, dozens of people whom she’d met and won over with just a few of the right words. Reina is something else, a woman she’s drawn to with whom she’s dropped any pretensions. Reina is beautiful, is captivating, and Emma treasures every night they share, even if they’ve never so much as kissed.

 

And now Reina is gone, furious with her because of something Emma hadn’t even _done_. Emma sighs, banging her head against the table again. Reina is the only good thing about a job that is growing stale, an escape from a castle where she’ll have to return eventually. And now Reina has left for good.

 

She returns to the tavern the next night, lingering near the stables where Reina uses her magic trinket to teleport in. But she doesn’t return, doesn’t enter the tavern when Emma goes inside, and Emma is beginning to despair.

 

Maybe Reina is simply angry with her. But Reina also has days where she disappears as well, days where she returns haunted and quiet. Emma would rather that Reina be angry than _that_ , and she paces in her hallway, grits her teeth and makes silly wishes upon stars that she might, somehow, be able to find Reina.

 

With that magical trinket, though, Reina could live halfway across the realm and be utterly anonymous here. There is nowhere to search for her beyond the local towns, and no one there seems to know who Emma’s talking about.

 

Reina is gone.

 

* * *

 

The prince looks at her with big, round eyes, and says, “But she’ll come back, won’t she?” The delegation has returned again, this time with Leopold and his wife, and Emma has given them a wide breadth when she returns to report to the king and queen. Emma’s tasks require her to fly under the radar, and she senses anyway that the royals are embarrassed enough by her that they are content with her avoiding Leopold. Her presence would be more ammunition in this not-quite-war that they’re fighting, and she keeps her distance.

 

The prince, meanwhile, is ecstatic. Leopold’s wife is sidelined and ignored, a face at meals but rarely present at the negotiating table, from what Emma hears from the castle staff. Instead, she spends most of her time with the prince, taking him out to the river under his guards’ watchful eyes and riding the grounds with him. Emma’s queen is reflective about it, _poor girl, at least she has some time to be a child again with him_ , and the prince has only taken this afternoon off from running free under Queen Regina’s watchful eye because Emma has arrived.

 

Emma is still morose, missing her own friend while the prince speaks ad nauseam of his, and the prince bumps her arm. “Maybe Queen Regina will play with you, too,” he says impishly. “She’s really pretty. I bet she’d be your friend if you wanted her to be.”

 

“Pass,” Emma says ruefully. She wants nothing to do with Leopold or his family, as much compassion as she might feel for his queen. “You keep playing with her. She’s bound to outlive him, and we could use an ally in that kingdom.”

 

But there will be no allies. The negotiations grow more bitter, as they always do, and Queen Regina goes out with the prince one afternoon and is nearly shot with an arrow by an overzealous knight. Emma hears about it from afar in the tavern, about a mishandled argument and a clash between sides that has the negotiations fall apart and the prince shaken. “They say he cries out for Queen Regina, day and night, certain that he’s the reason why the negotiations failed. Poor tyke has terrible taste _and_ terrible parents.”

 

Emma stares into her glass, longing to return to him. But there are days until her next scheduled visit, and she sinks into her seat, watching blankly as the doors to the tavern open and close. Reina doesn’t arrive, and Emma drinks more than she should until a newer barmaid sidles up beside her.

 

She is one Emma hasn’t bedded, new enough that she’d arrived after Reina had turned Emma’s nightlife upside down. “It is a terrible waste, seeing you pining day after day for that woman,” she says, an arm wrapping around Emma’s arm. “She must be exquisite to have captured your attention so.”

 

“She is,” Emma says glumly. “And she’s gone.”

The barmaid presses her lips to Emma’s cheek. “Fear not,” she says soothingly. “There will always be exquisite women out there, women who understand just how to treasure someone like you.” Her breath is hot against Emma’s cheek, and Emma closes her eyes, her resolve weakening with every day without Reina.

 

“You’re very kind,” she says, managing a smile. “But I don’t think…”

 

“You don’t have to think,” the woman breathes. “Just feel–” She leans in, her breath tickling Emma’s lips, and Emma looks at her properly for the first time. She is pretty, the sort of woman whom Emma would have bedded on her very first day here if not for Reina. It would be so easy to forget for a night, to put aside this fixation and let herself enjoy herself for a little while. It would be so easy to–

 

She leans in, her hands sliding into the barmaid’s dark hair, and an acid-sharp voice bites out, “So this is what you do when I’m gone.”

 

“Reina!” Emma leaps to her feet, and Reina is upon her, eyes flashing beneath her hood. She charges forward, pressing Emma against the wall, and then she’s kissing her desperately, Reina’s lips moving against Emma’s with all the force and passion that Emma has dreamed of for months. There are hoots in the tavern, and Emma pulls apart from Reina– Reina digs her fingers into Emma’s shoulders, tugging her closer still– to glare at everyone around them.

 

“Ignore them,” Reina whispers, and Emma lifts her up into her arms and staggers down the hall, the long cloak whipping around them as Emma hoists Reina against her chest to unlock the door. Reina nips at her shoulder, at her neck, sucks hard until Emma knows there will be a purpled mark there in the morning. “ _Mine_ ,” Reina hisses. “No more barmaids. No more running off. No more–”

 

The door slides open and Emma kicks it closed behind them, tossing Reina onto the bed with a swift movement. Reina gasps out a curse and then Emma is climbing onto the bed over her, hands digging into the mattress and knees between Reina’s spread legs. “You just spent _weeks_ sulking, so don’t even–”

 

Reina’s pupils are dilated, her eyes hungry, and she seizes Emma’s vest with one hand and yanks her to her. “Bed me,” she orders, and Emma opens her cloak with a swift movement, baring the white shift beneath it.

 

It is light, nightclothes for a woman who pretends to sleep and goes wandering instead, but what captures Emma’s attention are the dark bruises across Reina’s upper arms. They are shaped unmistakably– a hand, holding down each of Reina’s arms, and Reina shakes her head and says, “No, Swan, please– don’t look at them–”

 

Emma wants to rage, wants to demand answers and force Reina to tell her everything. But Reina is writhing beneath her, is begging in whimpers, “Please, just _touch_ me–” and so Emma touches her, slides down along Reina’s body until she can remove the nightgown.

 

There is nothing beneath it but scars, and Emma looks up at Reina again, sees bruises on her breasts and shakes with helpless fury. Reina’s eyes are closed, and when she opens them, it’s with apprehensive eyes.

 

And when Emma can think past the fury, she sees the fear and self-loathing and understands what it is that Reina is apprehensive about. The scars slash across her abdomen as though someone had been careful only to mark her there. Her mother, perhaps, or the husband she can’t possibly have.

 

They are constellations across her skin, patterns of a story that Emma hasn’t been privy to, and Emma descends to kiss them, to trace her tongue along the dip of them and press her lips to every bruise. Reina gasps, thrashing against her, and Emma traces the lines between the scars, caresses each one as Reina winds her arms around Emma’s body and her vest falls from her.

 

It startles Emma, who hadn’t noticed Reina unbuttoning it, and her shirt is pulled over her head while she’s blinking in confusion. Reina goes for her pants last, buries her hands within them to squeeze Emma’s ass, and then Emma thinks of little else but Reina’s grasp, but the kisses Reina dots along her neck, but the sounds Reina makes, ever demanding, when Emma nestles between her legs and licks her up and down.

 

Reina comes, and comes, and comes. Reina latches onto Emma’s breasts and flattens her against the mattress with clumsy eagerness, grinds against Emma with wanton abandon and plunges her fingers into Emma until Emma is cresting a swooping wave, her stomach flipping and her heart pounding with ecstasy. Emma comes again, then again, Reina as insatiable as she is after so many weeks of foreplay, and it is late at night when they’re finally spent, sticky and content as Reina laps up the last of Emma’s juices and curls up beside her.

 

“So this is the end, then,” Reina says, and she sounds suddenly small, the confidence of a half-dozen orgasms fading away with only that. “You’ve finally bedded me. I know how this goes.”

 

Emma catches her hands with her own, kisses Reina desperately and feels a hot bolt of fear at the idea of Reina leaving. “Not _this_ ,” she says. “Not how _this_ goes. Don’t leave me.” Their lips meet, again and again, and Emma is drunk with desire and longing.

 

Reina is no barmaid, a quick distraction looking for a badge of honor of their own. Reina is _hers_ , someone she’d found and connected with, someone without whom her life fades to dull grey. Emma won’t let her go over a reputation she’s cultivated for her own purposes, over a role she plays rather than being herself.

 

“Stay,” she whispers, and she wraps her arms around Reina, naked body, kisses the bruises that large, rough hands have left upon her. “Don’t go back there,” she pleads, a voiceless whisper, but Reina is gone in the morning.


	2. Chapter 2

She is back the next night, her steps more graceful and a dance to them as she waits by the door to the tavern and then disappears into the hallway. She’s inside Emma’s room when Emma pushes the door open, and she presses happy kisses to Emma’s lips as Emma lifts her up, letting out a squeal as her legs wind around Emma’s hips and her back falls against the wall.

 

“I saw you taking that girl like this,” Reina sighs. “I wanted–” 

 

“You wanted to be her,” Emma says, sucking on her collarbone. Reina pushes her away before she leaves a mark, her eyes warning. 

 

“I wanted you to  _ pay attention to me _ ,” Reina says. “Being here– with you– it’s a risk I shouldn’t be taking.” She is serious, and Emma pulls back to look at her, her hands digging into Reina’s back as Reina slides to stand on the ground. “I have something for you.” 

 

Her hand disappears into her cloak and then emerges with a set of rings. “They’re enchanted,” she says. “If you hold it to your lips and think of me, then my stone will turn green.” She slips one on, then holds out the other for Emma. “Here,” she says, closing her eyes and pressing the stone of the ring to her lips. Emma’s glows a bright emerald. “It is a way to know– if I’m here, or if I want to be. No more time spent sulking because one of us is gone.” 

 

The ring shifts in color to brown tourmaline, the shade of Reina’s eyes. Reina’s ring, Emma notices, is a blue-green in hue now. “Okay,” Emma whispers, and Reina smiles, smiles, until Emma lifts her into her arms again and the smile fades to anticipation.

 

They fall into an easy routine, night after night spent together, Emma’s stone glowing green when Reina is waiting at the door to her room. Sometimes, they still go out and ride together, or walk down to the lake, speaking in murmurs of their shadowed lives, of politics and tensions at the borders and quiet dreams. Sometimes there are nights when they never make it out of Emma’s room. Emma does her duties for the king and queen, but she finds herself getting the information she needs faster, finds herself spending less and less time in the tavern.

 

Reina never stays the night, no matter how much Emma pleads for her to remain. “I can’t be out too late,” she says regretfully.

 

“Tell me where you go when you leave me,” Emma whispers, and Reina kisses her, long and hard, a hand toying with her breast as though it is hers to keep. Emma writhes beneath her, craves her touch as she does water and air, and Reina brushes the hair from her face and then sighs.

 

She looks at Emma for a fraught moment, and then she whispers, “I don’t think that would be wise.” 

 

Neither of them have shared the truth about their identities, and both know it. Emma has broken an implicit agreement just in asking where Reina goes. There is a fragile, silent consensus between them, an awareness that they are hiding in this tavern on the border and that there is plenty to hide from.

 

It is enough that they can meet most nights.

 

During the day, her ring lights up green from time to time, and Emma looks at it and smiles like an idiot. “Am I ever gonna meet your friend?” the prince asks one day. He is seven now, a little wiser every day, and Emma is already certain that he’ll make a worthy king someday.

 

“I don’t know. If I can talk her into it,” Emma promises, but she knows already that Reina will never agree. Reina still creeps out of the room each night when Emma’s asleep, sometimes even before that, shimmering away into her true life before the sun is up.

 

“I could come to the tavern,” the prince says, bouncing in his seat, and Emma looks at him in alarm. The prince sulks. Emma brushes a kiss to the top of his head and wanders back to the stables.

 

She rides back to the tavern at nightfall, chatting with barmaids who know better now than to get too close to her. There is much discussion of the not-quite-war that is on the verge of erupting yet again. One of the Northern Kingdom’s scouts had been caught in contested land and killed, and the kingdom is close to making an official declaration of war. Leopold is silent on the matter, his ministers insistent that the scout had been in their land and had gotten what she’d deserved. Leopold’s ministers hold as much power as Leopold himself, though, and their refusal to make an official apology speaks volumes.

 

If there is a war, Emma will be needed in action, will not see Reina for weeks. She shudders at the thought, pressing her lips to her ring as she dwells on her, and she knows that somewhere out there, Reina’s ring is green.

 

But Reina doesn’t come to the tavern that night. It’s the first time she’s skipped a night since she’d given Emma the ring, and Emma spends the bulk of the night staring at it, the gossip and conversation around her fading into background noise as she waits for a woman who hasn’t arrived.

 

Then, something unexpected. The ring glows a reddish color, dark-hued as blood. Emma stares at it, her heart thumping with panic, and she doesn’t know what it  _ means _ , what it could possibly–

 

Is Reina  _ dead _ ? She’s nauseous at the possibility, wants to weep, and she gets up and paces from the stables to the tavern to her room. The stone fades back into brown again after a few minutes, but Emma’s panic remains.

 

She rides out past the tavern, deep into Leopold’s kingdom, dodging guards who give pursuit. She doesn’t know what she’s searching for– where Reina might be, and she rides in circles across estates, causing a ruckus until the late hours of the morning when she collapses, exhausted and terrified for Reina, on the floor of the tavern stables.

 

* * *

 

There is a figure bent over her when she awakens. “Swan,” a woman whispers. “ _ Sir Swan _ . What are you doing here?” 

 

Emma opens bleary eyes. It’s after dark, and she’s curled up in the stables, stinking like manure. But Reina is huddled over her, eyes wide and worried. “What happened to you?” she whispers.

 

Emma launches herself up to her, throws her arms around her and kisses her tightly. “The ring– it–” But she doesn’t know how to explain her fears. In the face of Reina, so very alive and well, they melt into uncertainty. Had the ring ever been red at all? Had she been too drunk, too tired, too focused on missing Reina to recognize that she’d been dreaming?

 

“I missed you,” she whispers finally, and Reina strokes her cheek and murmurs, “You stink like manure. Come with me to the lake.” 

 

But there is a fragility to how she moves, how she watches Emma with such wistful longing that the sentiment must be returned. Emma’s hand slips into Reina’s and Reina cradles it in her own, holds it as though she’s been gifted something precious. Emma has spent so many years being  _ rough _ , being standoffish and loud and rude and everything but what she’d been meant to be, and Reina’s careful softness sometimes feels as though it might shatter her to pieces.

 

Emma strips at the lake in a matter of moments, shedding her clothes and tugging at Reina’s cloak until she does the same, and then they’re tumbling into the lake, lips welded together until they splash into the water and are suddenly gasping for breath. Reina launches herself at Emma again, kisses her with unbridled fervor, and Emma’s fingers skim the space between her legs and she thumbs Reina’s clit until Reina is sobbing.

 

There are new bruises on her skin, her breasts roughly fondled and a dark purple ring encircling her neck. Emma strokes Reina’s lower lips, feels her shudder against Emma’s shoulder as she comes. 

 

She rises to kiss Emma, to press her forehead against hers and run her fingers along Emma’s side. There is an aching gentleness to how they move together, to the speed at which Reina takes Emma tonight. Sometimes they are furious and quick, rutting against walls and on the floor as though they can’t bear to take a few extra steps to the bed. Sometimes, their movements are languorous, taking their time as though it’s a luxury to treasure in a stolen moment.

 

Tonight, Emma sees dark marks against Reina’s skin and can’t bear to be anything but gentle. Reina leans her back against a rocky outcropping, paints her skin with smooth strokes, kisses a trail across the creases and curves of Emma’s skin. Emma can only stare at her in awe, in agony, desperate for her touch and hurting for the bruises still so prominent against her skin. She doesn’t know what the red glow had meant, but she’s beginning to suspect that it had been real; that whatever it is, it hadn’t boded well for Reina.

 

She can’t let her go back to where she’d been before. She can’t let her be hurt again, can’t let her continue to live whatever hell it is she endures during her time away from Emma. It’s all she can think of as Reina writhes against her, as they grind against each other and explore the other’s body as though this is the very first time they’ve touched.

 

And when the lovemaking is over, the two of them stretched out on Reina’s cloak in the quiet of the shore, Emma can no longer ignore the marks as Reina wants her to. “My ring turned red,” she whispers. “What does that mean?” 

 

Reina closes her eyes. “Nothing.” 

 

“Reina.” 

 

She turns, her eyes open again and locked on Emma’s. “I meant for it to turn green when I kissed it,” she says. “I don’t know why it…” She trembles, and Emma blinks away sudden wetness from her eyes. “I wanted you to know I was safe,” Reina whispers.

 

Instead, her ring had given her away. Emma watches her for a long while, aching. “I’m a knight,” she says suddenly.

 

Reina winds a lock of golden hair between her fingers. “So you say, Sir Swan,” she says, her voice still lightly teasing.

 

Emma shakes her head, in no mood for it. “I’m a knight of the Northern Kingdom,” she clarifies, and Reina stares at her with dark, uncertain eyes. “I monitor the border from inside Leopold’s kingdom. Listen to travelers, watch battle patterns, report back to the king and queen.” 

 

“You’re a spy,” Reina murmurs, and she reaches out to cup Emma’s cheek. “This is dangerous for you.” 

 

Emma stumbles past that, past the note of worry in Reina’s voice. “The king and queen don’t like me, but they– but they would protect me if I needed them to. But they would protect  _ you _ ,” she says, and she rolls over to kiss Reina desperately, to push a dozen broken emotions into that kiss. “Run away with me. Marry me,” she pleads, and her heart is light at the thought of Reina in her arms forever, of Reina a wife who doesn’t disappear by morning. “We can be safe there. We can be happy.”

 

Reina watches her with eyes that are fathomless in their depths, that are ringed with sorrow and with the quiet regret of a rejection to come. “No,” she whispers, and she presses her lips to Emma’s. “I’m sorry, Sir Swan,” she breathes, and she cradles Emma’s cheek, their noses brushing together and their bodies interlocking again, instinctively, as though they’d been molded to each other.

 

“Marry me,” Emma says again, her heart aching with dreams that are wafting away as ashes in the wind. “I can keep you safe. I can save you from  _ him _ ,” she whispers. “I can–” 

 

“No,” Reina murmurs again, and a tear rolls down her cheek to her mouth, landing on Emma’s lips. She’s still kissing Emma as she reaches into her cloak and takes out her glass trinket, and Emma’s skin tingles with magic as the woman pressed to her shimmers and fades away. 

 

* * *

 

“You asked her to marry you?” the prince says, blinking up at her. “You haven’t even let me  _ meet  _ her yet.” He scowls, displeased with her, and Emma rolls her eyes.

 

“I told you, I only see her at night,” Emma protests. “And she’s over the border. There’s no way I could bring her back here–” 

 

The prince tilts his head. “You said she uses magic to get there. You don’t know. She could live anywhere. She could live one village away from the castle and you could have let me meet her _months_ ago.” He is reasonable as always, always too smart for his seven years. It’s simultaneously endearing and annoying as fuck. 

 

Emma sighs. “Anyway, she said no. So it doesn’t really matter, does it?” 

 

The prince stares at her. “She said  _ no _ ? Why would she– you asked it wrong,” he says knowingly, and Emma looks at him in outrage. “You probably charged in there and said it in a dumb way. Probably insulted her when you asked–” 

 

“I did  _ not _ . It wasn’t–” Maybe it hadn’t been romantic as much as a plea for Reina to run away with her, but it hadn’t been  _ insulting _ . “You know, I do know how to talk to people, kid. I’m an  _ adult _ .” 

 

“Yeah?” The prince thinks for a moment. “How do you talk to your friends?” 

 

Emma grimaces. “I don’t have friends.” 

 

The prince looks smug. “Because you don’t know how to  _ talk  _ to people. You made my mother  _ cry _ the last time you were here.” 

 

Emma hadn’t known that, remembers the row but not the crying afterward. She winces at more than one thing. “It wasn’t that. She just…I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t want to marry anyone.” Maybe she hadn’t thought that Emma could protect her from whoever it is she goes home to, though she doesn’t tell the prince that. He’s far too young to know that there’s anything in this universe that Emma can’t protect anyone from.

 

Still, she goes out that afternoon and purchases a glittering diamond bracelet from a merchant. She doesn’t know if Reina will arrive that night, but her ring glows green as she rides to the tavern, and she takes that as a good sign.

 

There are many useful whispers in the tavern today from a former servant from Leopold’s castle who has gotten a job at the border, and he spills his information happily after Emma lays a hand on his arm and buys him a drink. “King Leopold is furious that the queen hasn’t given him a child,” the boy says, gulping down his drink. “He’d married her only for an heir, they say. But she hasn’t given him one.” He lowers his voice, looking around furtively as though the royals might hear him. “They say she uses witchcraft to rid herself of his seed. She has magic–  _ dark  _ magic, that queen. One of my friends used to clean her room and find all manner of strange objects– torture devices, to be sure, and animals maimed beyond recognition.” 

 

“If I were the king, my cock would shrivel up and die whenever I saw her,” one of the other men says, cackling. “No wonder they have no children.” 

 

Emma tunes them out. She highly doubts that Queen Regina has any magic at all, let alone dark magic. The people here fear the people from island kingdoms down south nearly as much as they fear the northerners, and they’d all been scandalized when the facts about Queen Regina’s southern lineage had emerged.

 

She’s relieved when her ring gleams green and she can make her escape, throwing the door to her room open and rushing into Reina’s arms. There is a safety to Reina’s embrace, a certainty that she’s left her heart in a place that will never hurt it. “I have something for you,” she says, reaching into her pocket.

 

Reina leans forward, eyes gleaming with interest. “Do tell,” she says, and her eyes widen when Emma takes out the pouch with the bracelet.

 

She knows Reina must be wealthy from her practiced poise and her clothing, and perhaps this bracelet will mean very little. Still, Reina’s eyes widen and she takes the bracelet from Emma, draping it over her wrist and letting Emma clasp it. “It’s beautiful,” she murmurs.

 

“It’s been suggested to me that my proposal wasn’t very romantic,” Emma says dryly, and the smile fades from Reina’s face. “So I’m going to try to do it right this time.” She clears her throat. “I can’t– I can’t promise you  _ castles  _ or anything so grand,” she says, and she hasn’t wished that she  _ could  _ in a very long time, not until now. “But I can promise you…somewhere safe and happy–” 

 

But Reina is already shaking her head. “You know I won’t marry you,” she says, her voice pained. “Isn’t this enough?” 

 

“Listening to you tiptoe out of bed at midnight when you think I’m asleep?” Emma demands. “Sitting in a tavern, listening to idiots prattle on about Queen Regina and Leopold’s ministers while I wonder if you’re being  _ hurt _ ?” Reina flinches, and Emma softens her voice. “This is– this is never going to be enough,” she whispers. “Not for me. Not for us.” 

 

Reina closes her eyes and kisses Emma, sliding a hand beneath her shirt and resting it there for a long time. Their movements are slow today, and Emma is afraid to break the stillness of the moment, the whispers of kisses and touches that barely graze skin before they’re gone. 

 

She is on a chair, and Reina slides onto her lap, her cloak gone and nothing beneath it. Reina moves with agonizing slowness, grinds into Emma’s lap and squeezes Emma’s breasts over her clothes. Emma writhes in place, her eyes locked on Reina’s as Reina slips a hand between them, as Emma reaches out to take Reina’s ass in her hands, as Emma slides a finger into Reina and Reina cries out in ecstasy.

 

After, Emma is shaking from the force of her orgasm, still clothed, and Reina pulls a robe on around her and sits on the bed. The bracelet dangles from her wrist, and Emma says again, “Marry me.” 

 

Reina looks at her, eyes haunted and a hand at the edge of her robe. “No,” she says, and she looks regretful. 

 

Emma slides out of her clothes and tugs Reina onto her back, kissing her shoulder and slipping her arms around her. “Then stay for a little while,” she begs, and Reina falls silent and pulls Emma’s arms to encircle her more firmly in response. 

 

They lie in the quiet together, Emma pressing absent kisses to Reina’s shoulders and neck and hair, until Reina says finally, “Isn’t prattle about Queen Regina what you’re supposed to be listening to?” 

 

It’s the first acknowledgment of what Emma had told her the night before, and Emma shrugs against her. “Officially, maybe. But this was gossip, nothing very useful.” 

 

Reina curls up, tugging Emma closer to her. “What do they say?” 

 

It’s something else to talk about, something that isn’t about  _ them _ , and Emma sighs and concedes the argument of marriage again. “Nonsense. Bits about dark magic, or the queen torturing animals– whatever will keep the boy’s audience buying him drinks.” 

 

“And you don’t believe any of it.” There’s an odd note to Reina’s voice, and Emma frowns, wishing she could see Reina’s face. But Reina is facing in the opposite direction, and her body language is unreadable.

 

Emma sighs. “No. I don’t know Queen Regina, but my prince is very fond of her. He’s a good judge of character, and she’s the only royal who pays any attention to him. I’m inclined to like her just for that.” 

 

Reina is silent for a moment, but she rolls over to look at Emma. “I thought you said the royal family wasn’t fond of you.” 

 

“The king and queen don’t like me,” Emma clarifies. “The prince shouldn’t…” She stares at the woven patterns of Reina’s hair, splayed out around her face. “He doesn’t deserve to suffer because he drew the short straw in parents. He’s a good kid.” He’s the only reason why she rides back to the castle most days, ready to unload her latest batch of information on two people who disapprove of her so deeply and clearly. “He’s going to be a great king someday.” 

 

Reina frowns. “Isn’t there a…?” Her brow wrinkles at Emma’s expressionless face, and she shrugs, dismissing her own question. “Maybe not.” 

 

Emma stretches out beside her, toying with her hair in contentment. There are times when she wants to ask Reina about her home, about her family, about all the secrets that she keeps from Emma– but too soon, she remembers that too many secrets will be expected of her in return, too many truths she can’t share, either.

 

She wonders what it might be like to give Reina all of herself, to tell her every unspoken thought and dream that Emma dares have. She wonders what it might be like to be wed to her, to spend every moment as content as she is now.

 

She whispers, “Marry me,” and Reina only shakes her head and kisses Emma again.

 

* * *

 

Emma proposes every night.  _ Marry me. Please, marry me. I want to make you happy. Safe. I don’t want to be alone without you _ . Reina refuses her each time, kisses her to take the sting away and flees in the early hours of the morning.

 

There are nights when neither of them wants very much to move, and Reina cradles Emma’s face in her hands and whispers, “Will you hold me?” There are new bruises on most of those nights, and Reina cries silently as Emma embraces her, desperate to make the pain go away.

 

“Lie still,” she murmurs on one of those nights, and Reina obliges, stretched out in front of her as Emma spreads her salve into her bruised skin. Emma has to bite back fury when she sees them, her hands trembling with silent rage. Reina retreats when Emma is angry, is alarmed and worried by it, and Emma can’t bear to hurt her any more than she’s already been hurting.

 

She’s spent too many days on risky endeavors, searching every kingdom she can ride to for a noblewoman with a face she knows. But there is no sign of Reina. She could come from anywhere, really, and she refuses even to hint of the place from where she comes.

 

She is not from the north, unless her family had voyaged there when she’d been young as Lancelot’s had. The people are too pale, too fair, and Reina’s skin is light only with the pallor of someone who has missed the sun for too long. She isn’t from Leopold’s kingdom, because Emma has combed every inch of it that she could without being caught, save the castle itself. She is from a distant land, and she returns there each morning to be hurt once more.

 

Emma hates it. Her ring turns red again, enough times that Emma knows she isn’t imagining it, and it’s almost always on the nights when Reina doesn’t arrive at the tavern. She doesn’t understand exactly what it means, except that it fills her with mounting dread every time. 

 

She finds herself dwelling on it day and night, even as a brewing war finally erupts with botched negotiations. Leopold’s army clashes with the Northern army on contested land and a battle ensues, one that Emma finds herself in the thick of. She  _ is  _ a knight, and the army follows her, obeys without question and strikes out with skill and zeal until Leopold and his ministers must be rethinking their entire attack plan.

 

The first skirmish is won by Emma’s side, though she’s certain that the king and queen will find fault with her for allowing a skirmish to take place at all. She nods to the other knights who lead the army, a brief acknowledgement before she gallops off.

 

It’s nearly sunset, and she has a tavern to return to. 

 

She doesn’t see the soldiers following, so bent on reaching Reina in time, until there’s a shout behind her and she turns her horse around, drawing her sword. “There!” someone shouts. “That’s her!” There are a dozen of them, all on horseback, and an archer with them, his bow ready.

 

Emma raises her sword and rides at them. There isn’t much else she  _ can  _ do with twelve of Leopold’s men riding at her, murder in their eyes, and she remembers very little in the rush of adrenaline– only metal clashing, an arrow piercing her side, screams and curses as she takes down as many as she can with her, and then nothingness. 

 

* * *

 

She awakens in the woods, laid out across soft grass in a clearing with her skin tingling. Her mail is gone, her shirt with it, and there are soft, familiar hands moving over her body. “Reina,” Emma whimpers, and the tingling abruptly stops. 

 

A damp cloth is dabbed against her forehead, and Emma opens her eyes warily. It is Reina crouched over her, her dark eyes wide and stricken as they meet Emma’s. “Swan,” she breathes, and she strokes Emma’s cheek. “You absolute  _ idiot _ . Did you ride into an ambush?” 

 

“Kind of,” Emma says, rubbing her head. She’s afraid to glance down just yet and see the extent of the damage. “I mean, is it an ambush if they’re just chasing you from behind and you ride at them?” 

 

Reina pinches the bridge of her nose in absolute frustration. “ _ Idiot _ ,” she says again, and Emma bumps up her body to capture Reina’s lips for a moment.

 

She surrenders to exhaustion again a moment later, slumping to the ground. “Where are we? I made it back to the tavern?” She doesn’t remember that, doesn’t remember anything after sharp, splitting agony.

 

Reina shakes her head. “My ring turned red,” she whispers. “I had to…I knew there was a battle at the border. I searched the path to the tavern until I found you.” She shivers. “They’d just discarded you as though they’d thought you were dead. There were a number of men on the ground as well. Why did they target you?” 

 

Emma shrugs. It hurts, pulling at her side where she remembers an arrow, and she peers down and gapes. There is a wound there, but it’s scarring over, all but healed. “My salve did  _ that _ ?” she says disbelievingly. “I use it for  _ bug bites _ .” She’d never thought the fairies all that impressive, but her body is clean of blood or any gaping holes and slashes. Long, scabbed wounds crisscross her stomach and wounds, but she is otherwise fine.

 

Reina laughs, a note of unease to it, and she lies down beside Emma and kisses her cheek. “I was so worried, you  _ ass _ ,” she says, swatting at Emma’s unharmed side. “I did what I could for you.” She looks exhausted, worn down by the search, perhaps, or just by looking after Emma. “Just lie still. Let yourself heal.” 

 

“Ugh,” Emma grumbles. “Hate lying still.” 

 

“I know,” Reina murmurs, stroking her hair. Emma’s skin is tingling again, the faint sensation of healing.

 

Emma squints up at Reina, the tingling somnolent and heavy. “Wanna kiss you.” 

 

Reina kisses her obligingly, soft and affectionate. Emma sighs in contentment. “Wanna marry you,” she tries, and Reina laughs, kissing her again. 

 

“Not going to happen,” she reminds Emma, and Emma pouts at her.

 

She stares at the moon, drifting into a hazy sort of half-consciousness, and she mumbles, “I’d build us a little cabin in the woods. Quiet. Peaceful. Safe.” 

 

Reina scoffs, playing along for once, though her eyes are sad. “My tastes are far too expensive for that,” she says haughtily.

 

“Fine.” Emma heaves a sigh. “We can go live in the castle. Give the royals hell. Except the prince.” She holds up a finger. “The prince is ours.” She closes her eyes, a little dizzy at the thought of it. “The king and queen would…lose their minds if I stayed in the castle too long. They hate me.” 

 

“They made you a knight,” Reina reminds her, her voice subdued.

 

Emma bobs her head. “Exactly,” she says, which makes sense now, somehow. Her skin is still tingling, and her head is warm. “You would get on with the prince. He wants me to introduce you,” she says, yawning. Reina looks mildly alarmed at that. “After you agree to marry me,” she promises.

 

Reina exhales. “Swan…” 

 

“That’s not my name,” Emma says tiredly. “Sometimes I think about you saying it. My real name. I think…it’d probably break me,” she murmurs, and Reina looks at her with eyes swimming in regrets, in quiet pain that she doesn’t verbalize. 

 

Emma imagines Reina in the palace, though it is laughable to imagine that the king and queen would ever tolerate Emma there for long. She would get on with the prince, Emma’s sure, would have the energy and spirit to keep Emma going in that hellhole. Reina would be an advisor to the prince when he someday becomes king, would understand the ins and outs of inter-kingdom politics. In bed just last week, she’d delivered a scathing critique of the weaknesses of King Leopold’s defenses that Emma had brought to the castle as  _ intel from a source _ . 

 

The idea of the prince ruling the kingdom with Emma and Reina at his side hurts in a way that Emma hadn’t anticipated. Living in the castle has always been her worst nightmare, but she knows that she won’t be able to stay away forever. When the king and queen are gone–

 

That hurts, too, and Reina’s arm slides around her, holds her close. “What’s wrong?” she murmurs.

 

Emma stares up at her with drooping eyes, aches for a future they’ll likely never have. “Stay with me,” she whispers, and she wants to– she wants Reina’s real name, too, she wants Reina’s truths seared into her memory. She wants a  _ life  _ with Reina, and she’s wanted so many things in her life that she doesn’t remember anymore what it had been like to get them.

 

Reina curls up against her, Emma’s skin tingling even more at her touch, and Emma drifts off at last, surrendering to the sleep that pulls ceaselessly at her.

 

* * *

 

When she wakes up again, the scabbed skin is white scar, all but gone, and Reina is still in her arms. She’s sleeping peacefully, burrowed into Emma’s side, and Emma smiles down at her for a split instant, feeling refreshed enough to appreciate Reina in the sunlight. She glows, the golden luminescence lighting up her skin as though she’d been born to rest beneath it, and there’s a smile on her face as she dreams. Emma reaches up to run a finger through her hair, affectionate, and then freezes.

 

The ring on her hand is red. But Reina’s  _ here _ – how could she possibly be–

 

It’s daylight, the sun nearly at its noontime position, and Reina is here instead of where she always has to return to. “Reina,” Emma says urgently, shaking her. “Reina, you have to wake up.  _ Reina _ .” 

 

Reina stirs, smiling up at her drowsily, and Emma’s heart aches with the need to smile back, to reassure her that she’s going to be all right. “Reina,” Emma whispers, swallowing, and she holds up the hand with the ring wordlessly. Reina blinks, her eyes wide with sudden dread, and Emma hurts. “Don’t go,” she says urgently. “Don’t go back there. Whatever it is, I can protect you. We can get away from it. They can’t find you– The king and queen might hate me, but they’ll stand behind us if we seek asylum, if we–” 

 

Reina stares at her and then shakes her head slowly, fumbling in her pocket for the glass trinket that will take her home. Emma seizes it from her without a second thought, hurling it at a rock and watching it crumble to pieces. “I can’t let you go back there,” she says desperately as Reina stares at her. “I don’t know what he– what keeps you there, but it isn’t worth it.” A thought occurs to her, a wild idea that she’d never thought of before. “If they’re holding someone– or something hostage, we’ll free them. Whatever it is, it isn’t worth your  _ life _ –” 

 

“There’s nothing,” Reina says, and her words are empty, her voice dull. “But there isn’t anything for me with you, either.” 

 

Emma reels back, stung. “What the  _ hell  _ does that mean? I’ve promised you safety! I can guarantee it!” Another secret is at the tip of her tongue, on the cusp of revelation, and she has to bite it back. “I swear, I can give you whatever you need.” And a different secret emerges instead. “I  _ love  _ you, Reina,” she says beseechingly. “Please. I just want to help you.”

 

Reina doesn’t react to that, only stares at the spot where the glass had shattered, and Emma can feel a quiet despair at Reina’s silence. “And if…if you don’t want me, it doesn’t matter,” she says, her heart pounding with grief. “If you don’t want to marry me, that’s okay, too. I will keep you safe. I swear. Even if you never want to see me again.” 

 

Reina turns back to her, and Emma is stricken at the tears spilling from her eyes. “Never,” she whispers. “I will always…” But she can’t seem to finish the sentence, leans her head back against a tree as though overwhelmed by her unfinished sentence. “I can’t marry you, Swan,” she says hopelessly, tears falling ceaselessly down her cheeks. “I  _ can’t _ . I can’t keep coming here, hiding from my life, pretending to be someone…someone free, someone strong, someone who can…” She weeps, and Emma cries in furious frustration, raging at a world that keeps spinning as though it isn’t shattering with the glass trinket.

 

“Don’t marry me,” Emma says, lurching forward to kiss Reina. “Don’t,” she says between kisses. Reina kisses her back, again and again, holding her face as tightly as a vise. “Just come back,” she says, breathless. “Don’t leave me. Don’t–” 

 

Reina’s fingers dig deep into Emma’s cheeks, and she kisses Emma again, long and fierce, as though she’s searching for something within the kiss to hold onto. Emma cries angrily, cries helplessly, their tears mingling and falling onto a finger ringed in gold and red. “Goodbye, my Swan,” Reina whispers into the kiss.

 

Emma cries, “ _ No! _ ” clutching onto Reina, but there is a cloud of purple around them, consuming them both within it, and Emma can’t see anything but regret in Reina’s eyes. 

 

And then her fingers are slipping through nothingness. Reina is gone with the purple cloud, faded into the air as though she’d never been there.  _ Magic _ , a backup plan that Emma hadn’t dreamed of. And now Reina has left, maybe for good.

 

Emma throws her head back and screams, the sound echoing through the trees until it’s replaced by sobs of loss and defeat and useless, furious despair.


	3. Chapter 3

She stops visiting the tavern very quickly. First, a dozen nights spent at the bottom of a glass, waiting and staring at a ring that is red for three terrifying days and then is only the color of Reina’s eyes. She doesn’t know what she’s waiting for, what she believes might happen. The telltale green never returns, Emma excised from Reina’s heart as quickly as she had left. 

 

For a dozen nights, Emma waits, and Reina never returns. The barmaids are pleased at first to have  _ their Swan  _ back, but that fades as well when they come to understand that she isn’t back at all. She is ruined, her heart lost on a woman who has left it behind, and the barmaids murmur in distaste and then give Emma a wide berth.

 

Emma tries sitting with one of her old favorites on the twelfth night, tries pulling her onto her lap to whisper into her ear, but the barmaid only bats her away. “You aren’t interested,” she scoffs. “You want a distraction from your cloaked woman.” She sighs. “All of us– we all dreamed of you falling madly in love with us, of course. Sweeping us off to wherever you go when you aren’t here. But you’ll never want with us what you had with  _ her _ . No,” she says, and she walks away with her head high as Emma watches, chastised.

 

There is nothing for her in the tavern, and Reina has yet to return. A message is left for her with the barkeep and Emma rides away, back into the thick of the battle with Leopold’s army. 

 

The war escalates, and Emma goes where she is needed, is thrust into leadership positions where her army trusts her implicitly. “They’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” Lancelot tells her, riding up with her to the head of the army. “While you’ve been skulking off to taverns, ear to the ground, the people have been looking for a leader.” 

 

“The king and queen would never–” 

 

“They aren’t here,” Mulan, another captain of the troops, reminds her blandly.

 

The king comes in time to lead the army, but he says nothing of his newest captain, and Emma fights valiantly to prove herself in spite of his silent disapproval. Her army of knights is one of the best, and they win victory after victory over Leopold’s swarm of soldiers, who are many but too uncoordinated to win battles. 

 

They press closer and closer to the center of Leopold’s kingdom, and Emma thinks of little but the battlefield– at least, while she’s on the battlefield, when the simplest diversion might end in death. When they cast their tents at night, bearing ever inward toward Leopold’s castle, Emma lies on the floor and stares at her ring, dreaming of Reina.

 

Reina would find this entire exercise in killing futile, would dismiss it as  _ posturing _ and shrug it off in disgust. That, or she would listen avidly, making suggestions with the furrow of her brow, piecing together strategies with ease. Emma tends to fight instinctively, but Reina has always had an eye for how things work at their core, for what changes with every movement and overture to battle. 

 

She doesn’t press her lips to the ring and think of Reina. She has her pride, tenuous as it has felt in the days– no, months now– since Reina had left her. But she doesn’t remove the ring. Somehow, that seems a step too far, letting Reina go entirely. She bears witness when the ring turns red, more and more often as the days pass, and she weeps when she is alone in her tent, for fallen comrades and lost love and a woman she’d loved who only seems to suffer.

 

A year passes, then another. Leopold’s army grows bolder after victories elsewhere in the realm, and the queen calls the army back to lick their wounds after a failed attempt to breach the castle leaves the northern army shattered. Emma rides back, endures months at the palace where she avoids the king and queen and trains with her men and women instead.

 

The prince trains with her, old enough now at nine to wield his weapon with some success. “Do you think we’ll step down to negotiations soon?” he wants to know. “I hate war.” 

 

“Good. That’s a good way for a future king to think,” Emma says, ruffling his hair. They sneak off together into the gardens, huddling at a pond where the queen’s servants can’t summon them back. “It isn’t so easy to back out of a war. Especially one like this. We’ve been fighting Leopold for decades, even if it’s only official half the time.” 

 

The prince scowls. “If I were king, I would talk to Queen Regina. She doesn’t like war, either.” 

 

“Well, she isn’t saying much to her husband or his ministers about it.” Emma doesn’t think Queen Regina has ever enjoyed the kind of influence that Queen Eva or even their own queen has. She’d frittered away their time at negotiations running off with the prince, which says plenty about her interest in policy. The people at the tavern had never thought of her as anything but arm candy, there to produce an heir and failing even at that. They had feared her at the rumors of dark magic and disdained her at the rumors of miscarriage. “I’m sure she’s very kind,” she says hastily at the prince’s glower. “But I don’t think she can help with peace.” 

 

She flips a rock across the pond, the prince pensive beside her. “I think everyone underestimates her,” he says. “Just wait and see.” 

 

Three days later, King Leopold is dead.

 

* * *

 

It happens in a flash, so suddenly that Emma doesn’t know how she could have anticipated it. An elite group of knights had departed from the castle on a daring mission, an unexpected attack on Leopold’s castle. There had been three dozen of them, Emma’s hand-selected finest knights, and they’d used the element of surprise to their advantage. 

 

Emma’s ring is red on her finger tonight, but she refuses to let it distract her as they burst out toward Leopold’s castle, riding hard and striking down the scattered, startled knights who protect it. Reina’s fate is one that haunts her when she’s alone, but she owes it to her knights to fight back against the knights who struggle to overwhelm them.

 

They are upon the castle, and Emma shouts out, “Archers!” Merida and Graham ride up, their bows raised and their warriors behind them, and they let fly with dozens of arrows, shouting out war cries as more knights pour from the castle. Emma’s ring is glowing so brightly that it illuminates her surroundings, the fallen soldiers around her and the archers as they fire again and again, and Emma presses her other hand to it and waits for the final defenses to be breached.

 

When she removes her hand from it, the color is dulled, the red faded, and the castle is a ghostly silent in front of them. Her knights falter. Emma shakes her head, unwilling to be spooked now, and she calls out, “What are you waiting for? Attack!”

The knights charge forward.

 

A figure appears at a balcony above the castle doors, lit only by the moonlight. Emma can’t see her face, can’t see more than the silhouette of a woman in a long, flowing dress, and she feels a chill run through her as the woman raises her hands and fire and lightning rain down from the sky. 

 

It’s violent, dangerous, and Emma’s best knights are screaming in agony, horses rearing up blindly and the world around them quaking at the force of whatever the woman had unleashed. Graham falls, then a dozen more knights, and Emma screams, rides furiously toward the castle until there is a flash of lightning before her and Lancelot is seizing her, holding her back as she howls curses at the woman on the balcony and struggles to break free.

 

“We need you alive,” Lancelot says in her ear, over and over as he gallops away. “She’ll kill us all. We need you alive. We need you  _ alive _ .” 

 

Emma is still shouting herself hoarse when they escape back to the Northern kingdom, a ragtag group of knights who’d been lucky, not skilled, enough to survive that onslaught. And they’re greeted only by the grim, grim queen.

 

“What did you do?” she demands, and they discover that the story has been twisted already.

 

Queen Regina has sent furious word to the Northern kingdom through her ministers, hurling accusations at them for something Emma is certain is a lie. “She says that we killed King Leopold,” Emma says, pacing through the throne room. The queen, perched on her throne, only looks at her. “I mean– that’s  _ impossible.  _ We didn’t even see him. We just saw  _ her _ .” Emma is certain by now that the queen had been the silhouette they’d seen, her dark magic striking down Emma’s favorite knights. “She must have taken advantage of our approach to kill him and seize power while blaming us for it.” 

 

The queen watches her, considering, and Emma hates having to be here at all, hates having to speak with her alone. She does it for her knights, who deserve to be lauded as heroes instead of vilified because of some palace intrigue. She has screamed with grief until her throat is raw, and Queen Regina has orchestrated a coup and used her knights for it.

 

“We can deny the claims and weaken Queen Regina’s hold over her kingdom, perhaps,” the queen says finally. “The people are tired of war, and they don’t care for their queen.” She sighs. “Not that I blame them. No magic user is trustworthy.” 

 

Emma looks sharply at her, a single face swimming through her mind. “That’s not true,” she says, and she remembers purple clouds and warmth, remembers the joy of her ring turned green and the tingle of her skin as Reina had healed it. “Magic isn’t the problem. She is.” 

 

The queen spreads her hands in surrender. “Then we must stop her.” 

 

* * *

 

Queen Regina doesn’t depend on brute force and numbers as Leopold did. She is clever and stealthy, and Emma’s knights are weakened more and more every day. It’s a war, and they take more than enough of their enemy knights in return, but Emma has none of the confidence that she once had had. Queen Regina might  _ win _ , and she will settle for nothing less than the destruction of the Northern kingdom.

 

“She wouldn’t,” the prince says vehemently, still Queen Regina’s greatest defender. The people have taken to calling her the  _ Evil Queen _ , but he refuses to hear it, had snapped at Emma when she’d said it to him. “She doesn’t want to be doing any of this. She has to or her ministers will stage a coup.” 

 

“Really?” Emma says, dubious of her prince’s good heart. “Because she seems determined as  _ fuck _ to send us all into the ground.” 

 

“She’s proving herself.” The prince is almost ten and so naive that Emma’s heart breaks to imagine him comprehending the truth. “She’s  _ good _ . We just need to talk to her. She’ll listen. I swear.” 

 

He’s stubborn and insistent, pursuing her across the castle grounds in an attempt to make her listen. “Everyone sees her magic and is afraid of her. But you know magic isn’t always bad. You still wear that ring!” 

 

“That’s  _ different _ , kid–” 

 

“Because it was your friend?” the prince demands.

 

“Because Reina never wiped out half of my top knights in a single day!” War is war and Emma has lost plenty of friends over the years, but she still remembers the terror that had come with the very skies turning against them. “And then framed us for regicide!” 

 

The prince scowls at her. “Right, because you were just sending a harmless peace delegation,” he says, and Emma blinks at him, because when had he gotten old enough to develop that kind of attitude? “I’ve lost friends to this war, too,” the prince says pleadingly. “I want it  _ over _ . But my parents won’t listen to me. They just order attack after attack and Regina has no  _ choice  _ but to defend herself!”

 

“Defense? Is that what we’re calling it?” Emma demands disbelievingly. “She’s  _ destroying  _ us.” 

 

The prince throws up his hands in frustration. “Because no one will give her a  _ chance _ !” He reaches for her, wraps his arms around her arm and looks up at her pleadingly. “Go to her,” he begs. “ _ Talk  _ to her. You’ll see what I did. I know you will.” 

 

Emma shakes her head. “I’d do anything for you,” she begins her gentle refusal, and the prince stares at her in layered betrayal.

 

“No, you wouldn’t,” he says, and he tears his arms from her and bolts from the room, leaving Emma behind feeling very helpless and lost.

 

* * *

 

The prince is gone. Emma awakens the next morning to shouts and guards running to and fro, calling his name, and she rolls out of bed and hurtles through the halls in a panic. But he is nowhere to be found. He’d taken Emma’s horse and had been spotted by a villager near the castle, riding toward the south.

 

_ Of course _ . The prince, exasperated by her refusal to help, has taken matters into his own hands. Emma wants to sob with frustration, but she doesn’t have  _ time _ . Instead, she listens for bare moments as the queen amasses an army and sends out diplomats and then she leaves, her heart pounding. 

 

The prince is in danger, and Emma can think of little else. She takes the fastest horse in the royal stables and rides into the kingdom, pushing herself harder than she ever has before. She is sore and exhausted by the time she crosses into Queen Regina’s kingdom, using the secret bypasses she’d used when she’d been a spy. There is no time to lose. 

 

The prince is a kindhearted fool, and he believes that Queen Regina will treat him as more than a pawn to strike out at the king and queen. So brave…so  _ idealistic _ , and he will pay for it as much as Emma once had. She clutches onto her reins, the weight of her sword her only comfort as she descends into enemy territory. The prince doesn’t deserve any of this. He was meant to be  _ safe _ , to be a child pampered and raised in the comforts of the castle, a noble boy who would never know war.

 

She hates the king and queen for pursuing this endless war over a tiny piece of territory. She hates Queen Regina for fighting back so fiercely, for putting it into the prince’s head that she might be anything but a demoness. She hates everyone for a dozen reasons each, everyone except for the prince, whom she can never hate–

 

–and Reina, in some distant realm, whose ring hasn’t turned red again since the night that they’d attacked the castle.

 

Mulan has always told her that she is too easily lost in her own head, that her inattentiveness will hurt her someday. She doesn’t realize that she’s picked up a tail until her horse rears up and brays, an arrow puncturing its side, and there are a dozen men upon her.

 

“It’s  _ her _ !” one of them says, his eyes wide with glee at an unexpected treasure, and Emma draws her sword and stumbles from the horse, letting it flee as she faces the enemy.

 

It’s over in minutes.

 

* * *

 

She awakens in the dungeons of Queen Regina’s castle, hanging from the wall with chains that have already rubbed her wrists raw. There is a man standing over her with a frightening gleam in his eye. “Do it,” he says, and Emma’s skin is at once alive with agony.

 

The pain is _ everything _ , consumes her from head to toe as her captor puts her through torture techniques so vile that they’ve been outlawed in the Northern kingdom. Emma screams until her throat is raw, sobs at the pain and is only given more and more.

 

“Tell me what your mission was, Swan,” her captor hisses over and over again, and Emma spits blood at his feet. Enduring this hell is unlikely, the pain more than she can bear. Betraying the prince is impossible. 

 

She thrashes and kicks out and catches her captor in the gut once before he chains her feet as well, before she can only strain in futile despair as hot iron tears at her skin, as she is whipped and beaten to a bloody pulp, as the demands grow more and more strident. She buckles under the pain, snarls curses at her torturers and their queen, and receives only mocking laughter in return.

 

“The Evil Queen doesn’t even know that you’re here,” one says silkily. “She’s been dealing with some matter at the border. When she returns to find a spy in our castle, she will have her own fun with you.” He whips lashes into her back until she can feel blood dripping down it, her ragged clothing soaked with blood and painfully stuck to her. 

 

It feels like an eternity in the dungeons, fading in and out as the pain abates and increases, and Emma is delirious with it, can hardly remember her own name. She cries out for the prince, for Reina, even for parents who have abandoned her long ago, but no one comes for her. There is only cruel mocking, sly captors who demand answers she won’t give and take sadistic pleasure in her pain.

 

She has vivid dreams through the torture, hallucinations of a happier, better time. The prince, sparring with her with his smile bright, looking up at her as though she’s his universe.  _ You’re the strongest person I know _ , he says, and she cries out for him. Lancelot, his eyes grave as he stands beside her.  _ Your people respect you. Your knights believe in you _ . Her parents, eyes glittering with pride.  _ Emma. We love you. _

 

Reina, emerging as a vision descending the stairs of the dungeon.  _ Take her down _ , she says, her voice stricken.  _ Swan. Take her down _ , a red stone glittering on her finger and this hallucination is as violently realistic as Emma can take in this pain, right down to the way that Emma falls to the ground and promptly faints.

 

* * *

 

“Wake up.” It isn’t her captor’s voice, but another knight, unfriendly and harsh. A kick to her side, which isn’t nearly as painful as it had been the last time she’d awakened. And  _ lower _ .

 

She’s on the ground, her manacles released and the pain dulled as it hasn’t been in forever. When she tries to lift her head, the knight kicks her again. “Kneel before the queen,” he says roughly, and Emma lowers her head, staring at arms that look shockingly unblemished.

 

This must be a dream as well, except she can’t fathom a dream where she would kneel before Queen Regina. “I won’t–” she says feebly, and a voice interrupts her.

 

She can’t recall spending time with Queen Regina, can’t summon an image to mind when she thinks of her beyond the crude caricatures that circulate the kingdom of late. But she must have met her at least once, because there is a startling familiarity to the throaty, authoritative voice. “Imagine my surprise to discover that, for all the North’s platitudes and victimization, their fiercest captain has made a valiant attempt to infiltrate my castle,” the queen’s voice rings out. It’s not  _ quite  _ familiar, but there is a note to it that Emma knows, tries and fails to identify. Her voice is smooth and dangerous, affected as though every conversation is a performance.

 

Emma shakes her head, keeps her head on the ground and echoes, “Platitudes?” 

 

The queen laughs, polished and cold. “You claim to want peace and yet you send a spy.” 

 

_ Claim to want peace _ . Had the prince’s mad mission managed to get through to the king and queen? Had he made it home, or is he– “The prince,” she says hoarsely. “I won’t speak to you until you tell me–” 

 

“You are in no position to make demands,” the queen says, and the knight kicks her again. The queen says sharply, “ _ Enough _ .” She speaks to Emma again, her voice still eerily familiar. “Your prince was stopped at the border and was returned home. I don’t kill children.” 

 

“Your men have done far worse,” Emma manages, but relief suffuses her, and she can breathe again. The prince is safe, if she believes Queen Regina’s words. And Queen Regina has no reason to lie to a prisoner. Does she? 

 

Queen Regina’s voice is cool. “As have yours. I am defending my kingdom from invaders who ravage my villages and slaughter my people.” The words are polished and precise, the tone imperious, and Emma can’t explain how they’re enough to have her suddenly guilty, suddenly searching for defensive retorts.

 

Instead, she is silent, and Queen Regina only sounds distant as she says, “But I would never have approved what you endured in my dungeons. Your captors have been dealt with.” Emma raises her head to try to stare at the queen, but the knight presses her back down to a marble floor. “And as a…token of goodwill, I will have you sent back to the border.”  

 

Everything she says is in that imperious, cold tone, and it is hard to believe a word of it. Still, Emma finds herself desperate to trust this woman, to have faith in her words instead of rejecting them. Perhaps it is only for the prince. Perhaps days of torment have broken her sufficiently.

 

There is a swoosh of fabric against the ground, an intake of breath as though Queen Regina might say something more, and then nothing. Emma raises her eyes at last and catches sight of the queen retreating, dressed in black with her hair piled high on her head, her figure as intimidating as it had been in silhouette that night. 

 

The knight gives her another kick, this one more subdued, and says, “Get up. It’s time to go.” 

 

* * *

 

Emma discovers very quickly that she’s been healed. Her bones and skin and muscles ache with memories of all they’ve endured, but her body is good as new, skin clear and back unscarred. She’s given a bath at Queen Regina’s castle by handmaidens who are somber and soft with her, who whisper to each other as they untangle her hair and bring in a new set of fitted knight’s clothing.

 

“If the Evil Queen truly wants peace–” 

 

“The ministers will never allow it,” a second handmaiden interjects, rubbing soap into Emma’s filthy legs. “They’ve never trusted her. They’ll say this is a ploy.” 

 

“Well, isn’t it?” a third pipes up, and Emma leans her head against the wall of the tub, exhausted with all she’s endured. “The  _ Evil Queen _ ? You know she killed King Leopold. Everyone does. The ministers are right to hate her.” 

 

“The ministers don’t know what he put her through,” the first handmaiden mutters. She’s older than the others, and she’s been no-nonsense since she’d first been handed Emma. “Good riddance to him, I say.” 

 

The other handmaidens gasp. “You mustn't–” 

 

“–the king was–”

 

“–she’s  _ evil _ . Everyone knows it–” 

 

“Hush,” the first handmaiden says busily. “We have a job to do.” The handmaidens fall silent, shamefaced, and clean Emma off in silence. 

 

She is dressed and given her sword back, then bustled into a carriage where she is sealed in and sent off. The queen doesn’t return to see her off, and Emma peers out the window, searching for a hint of the woman. She had despised her before this encounter, had seen her as the villain who’d decimated their armies with superior strategy and who is known even to her own people as the  _ Evil Queen _ .

 

Now, she isn’t so sure. Had Queen Regina taken care of her as an apology for the torture she’d endured? Is this an overture of peace? Had she been moved by the prince’s pleas? Emma doesn’t know what to think, but she wants instinctively to see the woman, to put the voice to a face and reason with her until she understands her. 

 

Instead, the queen is a distant figure from outside the window, watching Emma from her balcony. Emma squints at her and sees nothing, and she collapses at last on the seat of her carriage, utterly spent.

 

The past few… _ days? weeks? _ have taken too much out of her, have left her weary with all she’s endured. She doesn’t know how to process the torture she’d been through, and she shuts it away from her other thoughts, pushes it to the back of her mind for after the war. Right now, she just wants to go home, to see her prince safe and sound and berate him for his foolishness. Right now, she wants to believe that there  _ can  _ be peace, because too many people have suffered for the whims of royals.

 

She stares at her ring, the brown stone that matches Reina’s eyes, and she wonders if Reina has survived this war after all, or if the lack of red means that she is gone.  _ No _ . She would know if she’d lost Reina. Reina is somewhere far away from this madness, safe and sound as Emma could never give her. Reina might be in love with someone else by now, might not even wear the ring anymore, might… 

 

Thinking of Reina is as pointless as wishing for peace. All of it is out of her hands, and all of it will lead nowhere good for Emma.

 

She is taken to the border by Queen Regina’s men and handed off without ceremony to Mulan and her own knights at a tavern she knows too well. She stares around blearily at her surroundings and says, “Wait,” to a very bewildered Mulan. “There’s something I have to…” 

 

She stumbles out of the carriage and toward the front doors of a tavern that is quieter now, sparsely occupied since the war had begun. The Northern kingdom had taken this land years ago, and it has had its effect on businesses that had existed there before. There are only two barmaids remaining, and their eyes slide right over her without any recognition, a battered knight far from the bold-tongued traveler so many had been besotted with. 

 

But the barkeep sees her and his eyes widen, his hand going to his heart. “Swan?” he says in disbelief, and she offers him a sheepish smile. The barkeep’s eyes flicker to Mulan, to the armor that Emma wears, and he shakes his head. “I knew there was something about you,” he says, amused. “I just assumed you were some runaway princess out on a journey to find herself.” 

 

Emma shrugs, eyes flickering to the barmaids. They watch them, their eyes weary, and Emma says, “Did she ever come back?” 

 

“Once,” the barkeep says, and it’s apologetic as Emma sucks in a breath. “It was years later. I didn’t know if you’d ever return, but I held onto it–” He crouches below his bar, digging through the shelves until he returns with a sealed pouch.

 

Emma opens it as Mulan watches her in bewilderment, her heart pounding in her chest. Only two items are inside the pouch. The first is the bracelet that Emma had given Reina when she’d proposed to her.

 

The second is a piece of paper, tightly rolled and tied, and Emma unrolls it and reads the two words scrawled across it.

  
_ Forgive me _ .


	4. Chapter 4

“She  _ does  _ want peace,” the prince says, somehow managing to look smug about it. “I  _ told  _ you.” 

 

“We both almost  _ died  _ because you thought that, so don’t–” Emma begins, but her voice trails off. She might still be furious with the prince, who had wept when she’d returned and apologized a dozen times, but she can’t bear to blame a ten-year-old for behaving like a child. “Don’t ever do that again,” she says. “There are other ways to prove you’re right.” 

 

She slumps back into the bed where she’s been ordered to take a mandatory leave from the army. She’d tried defying it on her first day at the castle and Lancelot had lifted her onto his shoulder and tossed her back into the bed, and now she sulks there in silence and refuses to talk to him. He just laughs and brings her cake as an apology, which she gobbles down while scowling at him. 

 

The prince tilts his head as he watches her, leaning back against her pillows. “The queen wept when you were gone,” he says, and Emma’s traitorous heart wrenches at that. “She was so afraid to lose you.” 

 

“Guilt is a powerful motivator,” Emma mumbles, staring at her blanket. “No one wants to hear that one of their best knights vanished chasing after their runaway kid–” 

 

“Emma,” the prince says, and his face is solemn. “Give them a chance, okay? I want…I want you to be happy. I want them to be happy, too.” 

 

Emma closes her eyes, her breath shallow, and the prince wriggles up against her. “The king and queen have requested your presence when you’re well enough to see them,” he admits. “I was supposed to tell you that. But I didn’t want you to leave.” 

 

Emma feels a rush of fondness for this boy, who has only ever cared about her as no one else does, when she deserves it the least. “Don’t worry, kid. I’m not in a rush to go out there.” 

 

The prince exhales, annoyed and relieved at once at her reluctance to go, and Emma brushes a kiss to the top of his head. “ _ Fine _ ,” he says. “So tell me. How was Regina?”

 

Emma snorts. “I didn’t even get a chance to see her face,” she admits. “But she was…different than I imagined her. Scary,” she adds hastily, because the prince is grinning at her. “But not  _ completely  _ unkind.” 

 

“I knew you’d like her,” he says, smug again, and Emma bops him on the head. 

 

“I think I’d rather talk to the king and queen than you right now,” she says, but there’s no venom behind it. “Where’s my mail?” 

 

She only finds dresses in the closet, which is… _ typical _ , and she tears off the top of one and pairs it with a pair of trousers she bullies out of one of the servants. She stalks to the throne room, feeling eyes on her all the way there, and even the prince doesn’t follow her past that doorway.

 

The king and queen see her and fall silent. The king gives their guards a curt nod and they filter out, closing the big double doors behind them, and then Emma is alone with the king and queen. 

 

“It’s good to see you well,” the queen says, and Emma nods shortly, uninterested in niceties. “We were…worried when you were gone.” 

 

“We were like wild beasts flailing for help,” the king corrects her, reaching out to twine his fingers with the queen’s. Emma doesn’t smile, and the king sighs. “But your safe return and the incident that preceded it were enough for…well, some negotiations have begun.”

 

This she can talk about. “Good. I won’t fight a war over a tiny patch of land anymore,  _ Your Majesty _ . It’s an exercise in ego that has killed too many people I care about–” 

 

“We have agreed to cede the land we’ve taken,” the queen says. “And Queen Regina has agreed to cede the land that had been ours.” 

 

Emma blinks at them. “That’s it? So we have peace?” It sounds too easy, too simple for hostilities and resentment that had been ongoing since before Emma had been born. “You hand over some land and think it’ll stick?” 

 

The king and queen exchange a look. “The ministers share your trepidation,” the queen says formally. “Ours as well as theirs. The people are clamoring for a more permanent peace than a ceasefire, and the ministers down south don’t exactly…”

 

Another shared glance, equally loaded. Emma tenses. “They don’t trust the Evil Queen,” the king says. “We don’t, either. There are some concerns that she will strike out independently, and the only solution that seems to please the ministers is…” His voice trails off, and he looks uncomfortable.

 

The queen slides off her throne, descending until she is standing at Emma’s height, her hands clasped and her head bowed. “The ministers are demanding a royal marriage to solidify a permanent alliance,” she says quietly. “We fought it, and we will continue to fight it. The Evil Queen is just as unhappy about it. I know it isn’t–” 

 

“No!” Emma says, and she’s furious, betrayed by these royals who were meant to protect the prince. “The prince is a  _ child _ ! Didn’t you hear what she did to her last husband? I don’t care how much he likes her, that’s a vile–” 

 

“ _ Emma _ ,” the queen says, shaking her head, and Emma’s stomach drops. “Don’t do this.” 

 

“Fight for the prince?” Emma says incredulously. “Of course I’d–” 

 

“Act so  _ detached _ ,” the queen says, and she takes a step forward, pleading. “You keep calling him  _ the prince _ . You never even call him by name. You never call  _ us  _ by name!” She shakes her head, her eyes anguished. “It’s always  _ Your Majesty  _ as though it doesn’t  _ kill  _ us when you say it– as though it might kill you just to refer to us by who we are to you–” 

 

“That  _ is  _ who you are to me,” Emma says tightly, and the queen reels, the king dropping to stand behind her with his hands supporting her shoulders.

 

“Emma,” he says, his eyes wide and hurt and lost. “We’re your  _ parents _ .” They are hardly that anymore, and she has spent a third of her life denying that fact. She has no family, has no parents, only has a king and queen who don’t want her around. “We’ve been trying for years to be that, and you only push us away.” 

 

The queen steps in, her voice shaky. “I know you’ve been angry since…since the prince was born–” 

 

The words tear themselves from her throat, denial of whatever happy little fiction they’ve invented for their family history. “You threw me away!” she bites out. “You didn’t want me after  _ him _ , after you…” She blinks back tears. “You have a prince now,  _ Mom _ . You have a child who can be the kind of royal I could never be.” 

 

“That’s not what I wanted from you!” 

 

“Yes, it is!” Emma fires back, unwilling to see her parents rewrite history yet again. “You wanted me to be the regal pretty princess who governs from afar and never fights in battle. I was never enough for you! I never did what you wanted! And when– after he was born, you rejected me completely–” 

 

“I  _ didn’t _ ,” the queen says, her voice hoarse. “I’m so  _ proud  _ of the way you fight and lead. The people love you. Your knights love you. And yes! I wanted you to live a life where you’d never need to learn that courage! But you did anyway, and…” She wipes at her eyes, tearful, and Emma looks down, can feel her own breath coming in short almost-sobs. 

 

Her father touches her mother’s shoulder again and admits gently, “We didn’t always handle it well when you weren’t what we expected. Especially after the prince’s birth, Snow.” He lifts his eyes to Emma’s. “We might not have made you feel as welcome as you’d needed, and we’ve regretted that so much over the years.” 

 

Her mother bobs her head, looks at Emma beseechingly. “I don’t care if you want to be a knight or if you never wish to be queen,” she says. “I don’t care if you never wear a dress for another day in your life. I just care about  _ you _ . And I’m sorry I never made that clear. When we thought you’d been taken by the enemy–” She bursts into tears and it’s contagious, is enough to bring Emma to the same tears, and Emma trembles in place until her mother is rushing to her, wrapping her arms tightly around her as Emma hangs onto her. “I’m so sorry, honey,” the queen whispers into her ear, and Emma cries helplessly. 

 

“It’s not like I’ve made it easy for you to say so,” she admits grudgingly, the words choked and muffled by her mother’s shoulder, but the queen only holds Emma tighter at them, clutches her and sways with her until her father’s arms are around them both, steadying them.

 

It is only once Emma can regain her composure that she stares at them, registering at last what they’re asking of her. “And now you want me to wed the Evil Queen,” she says blankly.

 

“ _ No _ ,” her mother says, vehement, and her father’s fingers flex against his sword. “ _ Never _ . We have conceded to the visit and to the negotiations, but we have refused the ministers. There will be no marriage.” 

 

Her father begins delicately, “We thought…” and then stops, looking at his wife helplessly.

 

“We were concerned that some of the ministers might go straight to you,” the queen clarifies. “You have a habit to…well, self-sacrifice,” she says, sighing. In that sigh, there is more affection than in years and years of disappointment with her, and Emma flushes. “And if you thought that a marriage would bring peace…”

 

_ Peace _ . No more dead comrades, no more hostile borders. This damned war would be over and done with, and all it would cost is a marriage to a woman dubbed  _ the Evil Queen _ , a woman whom the prince likes very much. How many times had she wished that she could lay down her life to end this madness? How can she possibly step back from that chance now?

 

“I’ll do it,” she says, and her parents both stare at her in consternation and some frustration, and  _ yes _ , those are the faces she’s grown accustomed to. “I’ll marry the Evil Queen. If it means peace, I’ll do it.”  

 

* * *

 

She has a dozen arguments with the king and queen before Queen Regina is scheduled to arrive, disagreements on  _ self-sacrifice  _ and  _ selfishness _ and  _ what you don’t owe to the people.  _ They feel different than prior arguments, somehow, the quiet affection more pronounced and the odd sensation that maybe– just maybe– her parents might actually be proud of her.

 

They don’t want her to wed the Evil Queen, and the Evil Queen is just as opposed to the idea, from the rumors that filter to the castle. The prince remains stubbornly optimistic. “You’ll be  _ perfect _ ,” he says, bouncing with her as she rides with him. “She’s going to meet you and change her mind, I know it. And she’s really pretty, too. I bet as pretty as–” He stops talking, his eyes widening. “No one,” he says quickly.

 

_ Reina _ , because Reina still lurks in her mind, a thought she can’t shake. She wears the bracelet that Reina had returned and stares at it, wonders what Reina’s life might be like now, if she’s still out there. If she still thinks about Emma as Emma thinks of her. 

 

Marrying someone else still feels like a betrayal after Emma had been so desperate to marry Reina. But Reina had rejected her over and over again, had disappeared from her life, and Emma might drop everything now to be with her, but Reina isn’t here, is she? What use is there in feeling guilty now?

 

Still, she feels particularly guilty when she dresses on the morning when Queen Regina is scheduled to arrive. She is wearing a fitted white dress, a concession to a mother who seems close to tears whenever she sees Emma now. “I’m not dead  _ yet _ ,” she says irritably as her mother hovers, looking as though she might weep. “Maybe Leopold was just an ass.” The Evil Queen’s handmaiden seemed to have thought so.

 

She lets her excited handmaidens weave a flower crown through her hair, tease out curls that she hadn’t known she’d had, as though today will be her wedding day. When she looks at herself in the mirror, she sees little of the woman she is. Instead, she is someone girlish and sweet, her mother’s fantasy. 

 

Lancelot takes one look at her and guffaws so loudly that Emma has to slap his arm. “So this is Princess Emma,” he says, shaking his head. “I remember her being a little more…ragged.” Emma rolls her eyes, turning away from him, and he lays a hand on her shoulder and murmurs, “I’ll be here if the Evil Queen makes one wrong move–” 

 

“Stop calling her that,” says the prince, frowning at them. He is bouncing, the only member of their reception who is actually excited about it. The king and queen stand gravely at the front of the reception, Mulan armed beside them and a dozen knights around the procession, and the prince stands with Emma and Lancelot and cranes his neck to see if Queen Regina has come.

 

She arrives in a fast-moving black carriage, all welded metal and hard edges, and Emma tenses and forces a smile back onto her face. Her mother has shifted to block her from view, protective as Emma has never allowed it before, and Emma can only see the door to the carriage opening from her vantage point.

 

There are movements toward them, knights tensing and Lancelot’s hand on Emma’s back, and the prince is twitching with breathless energy. The queen speaks. “Queen Regina,” she says, her voice terse.

 

“Queen Snow,” comes the response, that maddeningly familiar voice still rich and guarded. “King David.” 

 

The queen inclines her head. “And might I introduce my daughter, Princess Emma,” she says, stepping to the side. “And my son…”  

 

Emma doesn’t hear anything else that is said, any words exchanged or what her mother says next.

 

The woman standing opposite them, her own guard far behind her as though they’re merely a formality– dressed in deep red with a collar stiff and high, leather riding pants accentuating the shape of her legs– her chin high and her eyes wide and startled behind a smile that is false and pursed–

 

–a ring resting on her finger, gleaming blue-green–

 

Emma is openmouthed, a faint buzzing in her ears, her heart quaking so hard that she feels faint.  _ Reina _ – no,  _ Regina _ – her once-lost love is standing opposite her, lips parted as she stares at Emma, and Emma can’t  _ believe _ –

 

Reina is alive. Reina is the  _ queen _ , her mortal enemy, the woman whom she’s on a mission to– yet again– persuade to marry her. Reina is Regina, the prince’s favorite friend, the woman he’d been so sure that she’d like. Reina is… 

 

She stands frozen in place, and her mother says, “Emma?” worriedly as she teeters back and forth, overwhelmed. Lancelot still rests a hand on her back, and Emma takes in a shuddering breath, her eyes locked on Regina’s.

 

The prince says, “Queen Regina!” and hurtles toward her happily, crashing into her with his eyes bright. She’s shaken from her position, the moment shattered, and lifts him into her embrace, whispering something in his ear that has him beaming at her in delight. She spins him around, glancing back at Emma more than once with eyes that are still unguarded and uncertain, and Emma stares back, wavering, and then can’t bear it anymore.

 

She turns on her heel and flees the procession.

 

* * *

 

“They had a good meeting,” the prince says when he comes to see her later. She’s at their favorite spot, squatting at the pond in the garden and skipping stones across it, and she doesn’t look back at him. “Maybe there will be an alliance without a wedding, but the ministers who came from Regina’s kingdom don’t think so.” 

 

Emma nods absently, eyes on the pond. 

 

The prince wrinkles his nose at her. “Regina doesn’t have much time to spend with me, but she promised that after the next meeting, we’re going to take a brief recess in the gardens. Just me and her.” 

 

Another nod.

 

“She was surprised you weren’t there,” the prince tries. “She asked after you.” 

 

Emma hesitates for a moment, then exhales, skipping another stone across the pond.

 

The prince says, “And she has a ring on her finger that’s just like yours.” 

 

Emma twists to stare at him in alarm, and the prince leans forward, her attention his at last. “She’s really Reina?” he demands, breathless. “My Regina is your Reina?” At her nod, he laughs in amazement. “This is _ great _ ,” he says. “You’re going to marry her! You’re already in love!” 

 

“It’s been years,” Emma reminds him wearily, the weight of the realization setting in again. She’s been dwelling mindlessly all afternoon, lost in half-formed thoughts that veer from ecstasy to despair, and there are a thousand reasons why this is all going to backfire. “And she doesn’t want to marry me. She never did.” 

 

“She didn’t before because she was  _ married _ !” the prince says. He has it all figured out, as per usual, and she finds that it only makes her more sorrowful today. “She couldn’t run off with you. Our kingdoms were on the verge of war! If she’d gotten asylum here, Leopold would have declared war right then! She was just trying to protect everyone!” He seizes Emma’s arm. “But  _ now _ – I bet you’re the only person she’d marry after what she went through with him. You were in love!” 

 

“I was,” Emma says dully. “I don’t think she was. I think…I was just an escape for her. I wouldn’t be that now.” She remembers how many times she’d searched Leopold’s kingdom, had hunted for a noble with Reina’s face and had never once imagined that she could be his wife. Regina had endured years of pain from a husband she hadn’t wanted, and Emma had never saved her.

 

And then Emma’s ring had gone blinding red, Regina pressed to her limit as Emma’s army had approached the castle, and Regina had taken the opportunity to kill Leopold at last and call it an act of war. Emma had been furious at being framed; now, she is grudgingly satisfied that she could have had some hand in Regina’s self-defense.

 

Regina had wiped out her army–  _ and you have done the same _ , she reminds herself, and she’s sick with the memory of war, with the years spent fighting a pointless series of battles that had only hurt them all. And now, peace is on the horizon, if Emma can only– if they can work through all that they’ve endured together and apart and–

 

She closes her eyes. Everything feels more complicated now, more fragile. She isn’t prepared to be rejected by Regina again, to know that it was never the situation but  _ her _ . This marriage had made much more sense when there hadn’t been feelings involved.

 

The prince leans against her. “You’re wrong,” he says fiercely. “I know her. And I know you.” There’s a pause, his eyes too inquisitive, too knowing, and Emma takes a breath under his wary gaze. “And you’re going to be  _ perfect _ .” 

 

He climbs to his feet, running off into the gardens, and Emma watches him go with her heart hollow and worn. 

 

* * *

 

There had been three good meetings today, and a requisite royal dinner to follow them. Emma skips out on dinner and the ball that will follow, unwilling to endure the sly nudging from ministers angling for a wedding. Instead, she sits outside with the other knights, finds a vantage point where she can watch Regina’s guards alone and eat food on her own as music plays in the background.

 

She sits on a stone ridge, surrounded by greenery and lit by moonlight, the teased hair and regal dress and flower crown gone and replaced with her customary mail. She slouches, hunches over her plate and watches the movements of the guards, feeling sullen and lonely.

 

“Well, well,” says that rich tone, Reina with that touch of regal imperiousness that makes her unrecognizable. Reina had always spoken plainly around her, just a girl instead of a queen, and this royal Regina is someone Emma doesn’t quite know. “If it isn’t  _ Princess Emma _ .” Regina steps out onto the little clearing, eyes on Emma and her balance returned to her. “You’ve ruined your hair,” she says.

 

The ring is no longer on her finger. Emma’s own ring has turned translucent, she notices suddenly, the color of Regina’s eyes gone from it. “This is how it always is,” Emma says, feeling the sting of it like a physical thing. “Don’t you remember?” She wears her hair bound back loosely, framing her face in messy tendrils. 

 

“I remember Sir Swan, who  _ insisted  _ she was a knight,” Regina says, her eyes critical as they run over Emma. “Not a spoiled princess who’d gone running off to drink and flirt with strangers at a tavern to get some sort of  _ rush _ .” Her voice has turned caustic, hostile.

 

Emma understands, and a tiny bit of her despair fades away. She’s always understood Regina, and with that understanding comes a new spark of determination. Regina wants to hate her, because the alternative is worse than anything she can fathom. Regina will find every reason to despise her. “I  _ am  _ a knight,” she says, refusing to rise to Regina’s bait. “Nothing I told you was a lie.” 

 

Regina scoffs. “Everything was a lie. You told me you were on your own.” She says it with deep, bitter betrayal. “I thought you were like me. But I was just a rebellion for you, wasn’t I? A way to scandalize your parents. You were a  _ princess _ ,” she bites out, and there is no pain, only fury. “You had  _ everything _ . And I was just someone else to save.” 

 

She sweeps around, the conversation over, and Emma tosses out after her, stung, “You can tell yourself whatever you want. It doesn’t change the fact that I loved you.” 

 

Regina twists back around, her eyes dark with fury. “Loved me? You never knew me. You knew  _ Reina _ , some quivering little flower whom you fantasized of sweeping off her feet.” She straightens, stands haughty and uncompromising. “I spent my evenings with you. By day, I learned magic, and I learned how to save myself instead of waiting around for a knight to feed her own ego,” she sneers, and her eyes are purple-black, magic dancing behind them dangerously. “People fear me now.” 

 

Emma doesn’t flinch, even as the skies darken above them and lightning crashes down around her. Regina won’t dare to strike her, she knows, not when peace rests on a fragile point. “I don’t,” she says, and she can feel the rush of the challenge, of pain and wanting and the exhilaration that has always accompanied their conversations present again.

 

Regina smirks at her, her lips twisted into an unpleasant smile. “You will,” she promises. “Do you know what I do to spouses I find unworthy?” She turns on her heel, ending the conversation again, and Emma lets her stalk off this time. 

 

She feels oddly calm now when faced with Regina’s anger and threats, unburdened as she hadn’t before, and she toys with her ring and watches the guards in the night, clear once again. 

 

* * *

 

Regina and the prince are on a boat at the lake together, sitting comfortably together as they row and talk. The prince is laughing, and Regina looks at him with such unfettered warmth that it makes Emma’s heart hurt.

 

It is the third day of negotiations, and all has been settled except for the matter of marriage. The queen reports that the ministers remain adamant, have all but demanded it as a condition to the peace, and Queen Regina has been equally adamant that it won’t happen. Emma’s mother is relieved and worried about that at once.

 

“Have you two spoken at all?” she’d asked tentatively, hesitation still in her eyes, and Emma had sighed and promised to make an appearance at the royal dinner tonight. Regina had made her escape from negotiations early today to spend time with the prince, and he waves at her from across the lake, motioning for her to join them. 

 

Regina says something to him that has him shaking his head, pouting and disappointed. Regina looks back at the shore. Emma lifts a hand in a wave, catching the prince’s eye, then Regina’s. Regina scowls. A twitch of her wrist and Emma is suddenly suspended over the water in front of them and then released, tumbling into the water.

 

“My mistake,” Regina says, sounding very unapologetic.

 

Emma thrashes in the water. She’s a good swimmer, but not with her mail on. It weighs her down dangerously, and she gasps out, “Help!” as the prince cries out her name, then Regina’s.

 

“Help her!” he shouts, and Emma slips underwater, woozy and unfocused as she sucks in water instead of air. A moment later, she’s on dry land, coughing up water as Regina perches beside her on a rock with one leg folded over the other knee. 

 

“You’re going to start a whole new war if you kill me,” Emma gasps out, and Regina only scowls at her. Emma stretches out in the sun. It’s unusually warm for the north, but she thinks it best not to mention that to Regina. “I thought I dreamed you,” she says suddenly.

 

Regina doesn’t respond, her eyes flickering away from Emma to where the prince is still in the boat, waving cheerily at her. “In the dungeons,” Emma clarifies. “I thought I dreamed you there, telling those men to let me down. But it was really you, wasn’t it?” The other hallucinations have faded away in the weeks following, but not the image of Reina, stepping into the dungeons with her eyes stricken. “You saved me. And then you called for peace.” 

 

Regina’s voice is cool. “If you think that my desire for peace is at all connected to you, Sir Swan…”  

 

“I wasn’t trying to save you for my  _ ego _ ,” Emma says, the accusation still leaving her outraged. “I was trying to save you because I hated knowing you would go back into that hell you were living with  _ him _ . I did it because I loved you.” 

 

Regina scoffs. “This conversation is over,” she says, and she vanishes with a flash of purple smoke, returning to her position beside the prince in her boat.

 

* * *

 

Emma asks the handmaidens for help dressing for the royal dinner and nearly loses her hearing over their squeals of delight. “We have been waiting for this for  _ decades _ ,” one says, bustling through the closets in search of clothing. “All those years of cleaning up after you when you were just a grubby princess sneaking toads and swords into your bedroom–” She sighs dreamily. “ _ Finally _ .” 

 

“Not that,” Emma says, suddenly uneasy at the dress choice proffered. “Or that. I don’t– I’m going to  _ trip _ in that one. I’m not cut out for–” Regina had been almost offended by her in the full princess getup, by how false it had made Emma look. Emma swallows and tells the handmaidens what she wants, what she can’t bear to wear.

 

She arrives at dinner in an outfit they’d all finally agreed upon: her hair tied back instead of curled, and a white shirt that ruffles at the top and nowhere else. She wears a black waistcoat and trousers with it, a white jacket completing the ensemble, and she feels, for the first time at a royal event, as though she might actually be able to do this more often.

 

Regina’s eyes are on her from the moment that she walks into the room, her gaze awed with a hint of hunger, and Emma gives her the tiniest curtsy, watching with satisfaction as Regina turns away. There’s a flush to her cheeks, and Emma is emboldened by it, takes her seat at the wide dinner table directly opposite to Regina’s. “I came for the food,” she says, winking at her mother beside her, who looks less than amused at her outfit.

 

To her credit, she forces a smile. “You look lovely, Emma. I’m glad you joined us tonight.” 

 

“I’m here for the food,” Emma repeats. The prince is watching her avidly, and he nudges Regina and whispers something in her ear. Regina’s flush intensifies.

 

Emma’s mother sighs. “Of course you are.” She lowers her voice. “I hear the courtship is unfolding in less than satisfactory ways,” she murmurs.

 

“I think we’re doing fine,” Emma mumbles right back. 

 

The queen raises an eyebrow at her. “She almost drowned you today.” 

 

Emma shrugs. “But she didn’t, did she?” Regina is watching them from across the table, eyes narrowed. Emma gives her a smile, the one that she’d perfected at the tavern when surrounded by barmaids. Regina’s lips twist and she looks away. “It’s all under control.” 

 

The queen sighs again. “Against my better judgment, I find myself liking her,” she says softly. “She is principled and focused and she cares for her people’s safety. She is nothing like the stories, and if you were to wed her, it might be…a beneficial arrangement.” She smiles across the table at Regina, who gives her a confused, uncertain smile. “But she swears at every meeting that she will not wed. She had a painful, unwanted marriage with King Leopold, and it has left her damaged, perhaps beyond repair. I don’t know if this is something to pursue.” 

 

“I want to marry her,” Emma says, vehemently and loudly enough that Regina’s startled eyes flicker up to meet hers. She can feel it in her veins, in her bones, a dream as potent now as it had been years before.

 

“Well,” the queen says, blinking between them. “Perhaps bring a change of clothes to your next outing, then.” She shrugs, beatific, and Emma throws a wink at Regina that Regina doesn’t return.

 

The royal orchestra strikes up ballroom music as the meal comes to a close, and Emma stands up and circles the table, Regina’s eyes following her warily. “May I have this dance?” she says, and Regina’s mouth opens, something scathing on her lips.

 

Beside her, the prince beams. “Of course,” he says, and she lifts him into her arms, setting him down on the dance floor where she can twirl him happily. He is ten now, close to eleven, and he is rapidly growing to the point where he’ll be leading her when they dance. Emma treasures this moment with him, ignores the whispers when they move together and loses herself in the dance instead.

 

“It’s gonna be okay,” the prince says suddenly. “I promise. I think…Regina really does care about you. She just needs to realize that it’s okay that she does.” He looks so hopeful, so certain that they’re on the cusp of that bond, and Emma strokes his arm and memorizes the look in his eyes when he has absolute faith in her. It won’t last forever, is tempered even now when they speak of some matters, and she pushes aside that thought, bittersweet as it is, and dances him off to her mother. 

 

She turns, finding Regina still seated at the table, and she extends a hand. Regina raises an eyebrow, unmoved, and Emma makes her way to her, hand still outstretched.

 

Regina takes it, rising gracefully to her feet, and Emma slips a hand on her waist, her other on Regina’s shoulder. Regina says, “You should stop that twaddle about wanting to marry me. It only emboldens the ministers.” 

 

“Hm,” Emma says, and she twirls Regina, struggles to remember every step of ballroom dancing that she’s forgotten over the years. She’s doing a sufficient job, she thinks, until she trods on Regina’s toes. “Fuck,” she says, very delicately.

 

Regina rolls her eyes. “You aren’t much of a knight, are you,  _ Sir Swan _ ?” she says it bitingly, as though it’s meant to insult instead of sending warm waves of nostalgia through Emma’s skin. “And you aren’t much of a princess, either. Where the hell do you belong?” 

 

Emma twirls her again, brings her close, Regina’s back pressed against her. Their right arms are outstretched together, Emma’s head resting beside Regina’s, and Emma can feel eyes on them as Regina’s eyes close, her hand over Emma’s on her abdomen. “With you, in that room in the tavern,” Emma whispers into her ear, and Regina tilts her head back, her cheek brushing Emma’s.

 

“You never knew me.” 

 

“I think I do,” Emma whispers. “I think…I think you don’t remember who Reina was. Who I fell in love with.” Regina is shaking her head, and Emma slips her hand out from beneath Regina’s on her stomach, lets it glide up to Regina’s neck. Regina lets out a tiny sigh, and Emma fingers a chain, nearly invisible, that she’s seen peeking out from beneath Regina’s high collar a dozen times.

 

Regina says, “It’s not–” and Emma pulls the chain out in a smooth movement. Resting at the bottom of it is Regina’s ring, still gleaming turquoise, and Regina shudders. “It means nothing,” she whispers. “It’s only…it was a sentimental habit. Nothing more.”

 

“You kept the ring on your finger until you met me again,” Emma murmurs, and she lifts her own ring to her finger, presses her lips to it and watches Regina’s glow green. “I think…I think you want me to fear you,” she says, remembering their conversation in the dark. “Because you’re afraid of  _ me _ .” 

 

Regina pulls away from her as though she’s been slapped, and she storms off the dance floor and out the doors of the dining room without a look back. Emma looks around, sees all eyes on her, expressions ranging from bemused to concerned.

 

She offers the prince a thumbs up and jogs from the room after Regina.

 

* * *

 

Regina is in the stone-floored sitting area of the garden where she’d found Emma two days ago, arms around herself as she gazes out into the stars. Emma stops at the entrance to the sitting area, and Regina doesn’t move, doesn’t turn to acknowledge her.

 

“There’s something you should know,” she says. “I never lied to you. Never once. I know it’s easier to believe that, but…” 

 

“Stop,” Regina whispers, barely audible amidst the rustle of leaves, and Emma takes another step forward. 

 

“I was seventeen when I discovered that I was with child,” she says, and Regina turns around at last, her eyes narrowing. Emma swallows, shifting in place as she struggles for the right words. “Maybe it had just been a final test of my parents’ limits. I don’t know. I spent years being insufficient, my mother and father frustrated with me and my refusal to play princess, and I finally crossed enough lines that I knew I’d ruined everything. The father was dead. I went home to my parents and begged them to help.” 

 

Regina stares at her, sits down on a ledge and listens in silence. Emma clears her throat. “My mother announced a pregnancy and went off on a retreat with my father and me. She returned with a new son. My son. The prince,” she says, and she feels unnatural weariness when she acknowledges it, feels her heart soaring and crushed at the same time. 

 

Regina says, “The prince. Henry is…your son?” 

 

Emma nods shakily. “Henry is,” she whispers. She had chosen his name after an ancient king of the southern island kingdoms who had been wise and good, who had been the kind of ruler that she had hoped that Henry would be. It had been the only thing she’d chosen for him, and it hurts to even call him by his name, to claim any piece of him. 

 

“I wanted for him what I couldn’t have. I wanted him to be safe and loved and revered by his kingdom, to be the kind of leader who could be…whoever he wanted to be. He wouldn’t have any of that as my bastard son,” she says, and she can feel it still sticking to her throat, the bitterness of the decision. “So I did what was best for him and gave him to my parents to raise. They’ve done well with him. He’s the child they always wanted.” 

 

“Emma,” Regina murmurs. It’s the first time she’s ever said her name, and it washes over Emma like a beautiful song, like a name worth keeping forever if it will spill from Regina’s lips again. “Does he know?” 

 

“I think he might suspect,” Emma admits. There are moments when Henry looks at her, his eyes warm and his heart as clear as hers once had been, and he speaks to her as though he doesn’t see her as a sister at all. “We will…someday, we will have to talk about it. Not yet. We’re not ready. My parents would…” She remembers very suddenly what it is that she’s come here to say.

 

She shrugs off worries for the future. “My parents couldn’t even look at me for years after the prince…after Henry was born,” she says. “Every conversation would end with them speaking of all the ways that they must have failed at raising me. They didn’t see me as their daughter anymore. I was a daughter without parents, a mother without a son–” She closes her eyes, sees in the last moment before that Regina is watching her with her own gaze eerily knowing. “If not for Lancelot training me, giving me my knighthood and assigning me to the border– as far from my parents as I could be– I would have been gone long before.” 

 

Regina crosses the stone floor slowly, her eyes trained on Emma. “A daughter without parents, a mother without a son,” she echoes, and Emma remembers the whispers that had swept the tavern at the time that Reina had first arrived there, stories of Queen Regina losing children and a mother who had disappeared by her hand. “I saw in you something I knew. I have been…so  _ furious _ at the idea that it was all a lie.” 

 

“I saw it in you, too,” Emma whispers. “You were all I had for a long time. I never lied to you. I was alone.” 

 

“You had a half dozen barmaids,” Regina murmurs, the ghost of a smile at her lips.

 

Emma shakes her head. “Always alone,” she repeats, and she takes a step forward. “Until you.”

 

Regina reaches up to caress Emma’s face, her fingers brushing along Emma’s cheekbone with aching gentleness. “I know what you’re going to ask me now,” she says, and her voice is choked. “It’s a dreadful idea. My dark magic makes me…I’m not always proud of who I’ve become.” 

 

“Me neither,” Emma says, and her lips graze Regina’s jawline. “I’m proud of you.” 

 

Regina shakes her head. “Reina was…gentler than I am. Kinder. I can be cruel–” 

 

Emma finds Regina’s earlobe with her lips. “The world has been cruel to you,” she says against it. “Reina wasn’t nearly as nice as you think she was.” 

 

Regina laughs unsteadily, her forehead falling to Emma’s. “You think you want this. But you will grow to hate me. Everyone does. I am– I have never been the sort of person who is  _ lovable _ , who has that happy ending that fairies’ stories are made of.” She blinks back tears. “You think you loved me, but you saw only the best of me, not the darkness or the anger or the vengeance. You never saw– oh,” she says helplessly, because Emma has brought her ring to her lips, has let the green glow speak for itself.

 

Emma pulls away from her, watches her with solemn eyes, feels nearly half a decade of longing threaten to overwhelm her. When she’d first seen Regina on a balcony, ready to rain hell down on the world below, she had thought of her as larger than life, as a mighty, fearsome woman who has the world at her beck and call. Now she is only a woman as Reina had been only a woman, someone real and human standing opposite her with her face wet and her gaze lost. “Do you love me?” she asks, laid bare and vulnerable for Regina to break her.

 

Regina kisses her, pulls Emma to her and presses her lips to Emma’s, over and over and over again. Emma kisses her back, open-mouthed kisses that are desperate and messy, teeth and tongues and lips all at once as Regina’s tears salt each one. Her hands run along the curves she’d memorized long ago, over every inch of Regina’s body as she is lost in memories, trembling at the yearning that comes with them. 

 

Regina kisses her, lips to her mouth and to her cheeks and to her eyelids, her hands tangling in Emma’s hair and pulling it wild and free. She’s still crying, is still young and real in Emma’s arms, is still the woman she claims over and over again not to be anymore, and Emma says again, “Do you love me?” 

 

Regina kisses her again, long and lingering, and then she pulls back, her heart in her eyes. “I do,” she murmurs, her knuckles brushing a trail along Emma’s cheek. “I do. More than anything.” 

 

Emma smiles tremulously, and she feels young and afraid again, a woman as tentative as she’d been in her room at the tavern on the first night that they’d met. “Will you marry me?” she begins. Two kingdoms hover in limbo in her words, but all she can think of is Regina, is the ring hanging freely from her neck, is a life where they are together in peacetime with Henry and a future ahead for them all. 

 

Regina is still weeping, but her eyes glow with that wetness, free of the bitterness and fear that has accompanied them since she’d arrived in the Northern kingdom. She puts her hands in Emma’s, holds them in a vise grip that it feels as though nothing can ever again shatter. 

 

“Yes,” she says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Emma's outfit at the ball is deeply inspired by [this](https://twitter.com/gaylisoncameron/status/1045501750910881793) because I'm nothing if not a thirsty gay. :')

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I would love to know what you think! You can also go [here](http://coalitiongirl.tumblr.com/coffee) to read a bit more about supporting my writing. :)


End file.
